Other Than Honorable
by Bitchin' Betty
Summary: More than any future apocalypse, societal collapse or economic crisis, it's the recurring memories of the past that Herman's under prepared for. The solution? Alcohol and strict denial. Contains references to war and suicide, references to drug use in later chapters. (Note: uploads are slow at the moment. Ch2 uploaded out of order)
1. What's the Password?

—

_Now light the candles; one; two; there's a moth;_  
_What silly beggars they are to blunder in_  
_And scorch their wings with glory, liquid flame—_  
_No, no, not that,—it's bad to think of war,_  
_When thoughts you've gagged all day come back to scare you;_  
_And it's been proved that soldiers don't go mad_  
_Unless they lose control of ugly thoughts_  
_That drive them out to jabber among the trees._

— Siegfried Sassoon, 'Repression of War Experience'

—

Sleep was inescapable, inevitable, indispensable.

Rationally, Herman knew all of these things, and he knew that fighting sleep would always be a losing battle. Still he resisted it. Sleeping made him vulnerable, vulnerability was intolerable.

To combat it he sculled coffee, burned through cigarettes, and popped whatever uppers he could get his hands on. In the end he always surrendered to his body's need for rest, and when he did Herman would dream.

Herman's dreams lured him into a false sense of security and hope. Maybe he'd win the lottery, or be a famous actor with some nice arm candy, or a snooker champion. Sometimes he even had his right arm back again. It never mattered how the dreams started because after a certain point the memories of the past would ambush him, dragging him back into the noise and stench and heat and confusion that had been 'Nam.

If he was lucky he awoke the way actors did in the movies — by sitting bolt upright, sweating, sometimes screaming until he either realized where he was or ran out of breath. More frequently, Herman would come back from the jungle with the metallic taste of adrenaline in his mouth, and find himself patrolling his home with the Colt Government that lived under his pillow, prepared to shoot with no quarter given. When he awoke on those nights he felt disorientated, his sense of reality and faith in his sanity badly shaken. There was a reason he had no mirrors in his house — they'd all been broken, shot at and kicked in, and over time he'd given up replacing them.

Tonight he'd woken abruptly. He'd had to remind himself to be grateful for that as he lay gasping in his bed staring at the ceiling. Gritting his teeth together made his head hurt and his jaw ache, so he stopped doing it.

_Get your shit together._ Someone — he'd forgotten now exactly who it was — had told him that when he'd first touched down in the middle of summer, shit scared and overwhelmed, in Vietnam. _You need to get your shit together son, no-one else is going to do it for you._

Herman guessed it was time to get his shit together, then, so he stuck his hand out into the darkness with an irritated groan. He grasped, found his lighter and a cigarette on the nightstand and stuck the cigarette in his mouth and lit it, pushing himself up into a sitting position on the bed. He inhaled, the strong taste of tobacco easing some of his nerves. Exhaling, he slackened his grip on the cold metal lighter in his hand, cleared his throat.

The lack of quality sleep wasn't helping his focus, his mindset — even his physical health. He wondered whether it was a worse fate to be run ragged through self-denial of sleep, or to allow the nightmares to break his brain night by night. Both felt like poor options; he rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand.

On some nights the sound of sirens echoed down the street — it happened so frequently he'd learned to differentiate between the different emergency services — but tonight was silent. All he could hear was the persistent thudding in his ears as his heart raced, and he could feel it in his chest—

_Thump-thump thump-thump thump-thump thump-thump..._

With an angry grunt Herman hurled the lighter across the room, and it hit some unseen object in the darkness with a metallic clang, falling to the floor with a muffled thump. He ran his hand through his hair, then growled and grabbed the ashtray from the bedside table, slamming it onto his lap.

"Fuck…"

Shakily, he took another long drag of his cigarette again, and flicked the ashes off the end. He exhaled — the cigarette got shoved back in his mouth unceremoniously as he rubbed his eyes again.

"Fuck it."

There was no point trying to get to sleep again in his current state, he knew from experience that the memories would come back worse if he did.

Subconsciously his left hand reached across his chest and rested on his right shoulder. His fingers — which had been slightly numb for years now — detected the uneven lumpiness of the skin there as he ran his hand over the scars. Some — the older scars — were old, and flat. Some were newer and raised.

He pinched his shoulder as hard as he could. Nothing. Herman smiled ruefully, remembering an old party trick of his where he would stub cigarettes out on himself to the mixed horror and morbid fascination of other guests. He stopped smiling when he remembered that he hadn't been to any parties lately, and that the last time he'd got blackout drunk he'd woken up with identical injuries.

Stubbing out the cigarette into the ashtray, Herman returned the dish to the table. He needed a distraction — his mind was wandering where he didn't want it to— and for Heman, distractions came in many forms: television, alcohol, cigarettes, books, drugs, sex.

Television was out of the question. There was nothing on at this time of night — nothing worth watching — and he didn't want to rewatch any of his old videos or documentaries. His cigarette had helped, but hadn't taken his mind off things, and Herman suspected that he wouldn't have the focus to start reading anything right now. Drug would make him feel worse. And he didn't feel like sex, not right now, not after what he'd just seen in his dreams.

That left alcohol. Normally, Herman was well stocked in case of emergency, but as he sat in bed he realized with a frown that he hadn't replaced his back-up liquor stash — which recently he had hit hard.

Herman grumbled. Herman wasn't feeling social, but an emergency was an emergency, and he needed to do something to chase away memories he'd rather forget.

Alcohol it was, then.

Reminding himself to look for his lighter before he left, he leaned down off the side of the bed with a grunt and grabbed a shirt from the floor.

There was nothing now but to quieten his mind the best way he knew how.

Getting ready to leave never took Herman long. He wasn't a complicated man — he only needed his keys, wallet, and knife — and he liked it that way. If he anticipated any risk of danger to himself, sometimes he'd take a gun — but Herman was well aware that the cops in Springfield didn't like him, never had, and he didn't want to give them another potential reason to shoot him.

Dressed, and with his keys jangling, Herman locked up the shop and stepped outside into the night, taking a moment to appreciate the deserted mid-week streets of Springfield. Nights like these made him feel like the last person alive — a thrilling but lonely concept, a misanthropist's holy grail of unlimited freedom. Freedom had always been, and always would be, his ultimate goal. Freedom was the thing that Herman strove for — the ideal held above all other ideals.

A deserted world, with no-one else around — that, Herman figured, was the ultimate freedom. No ties, no judgment, no social pacts.

Herman broke himself out of his fantasy. Right now he needed beer; the Kwik-E Mart wasn't open at midnight, and he'd been uncharacteristically unprepared for the nerves that had set in swiftly upon awaking.

His only option was to go to Moe's.

The distance from his shop to the tavern wasn't far, and after a short walk he approached it. Moe's always looked better at night, and from outside — the light from inside the bar seeping through the stained glass windows and bathing the pavement outside in a checkerboard pattern of green and red. The patrons, too (including Herman), looked better at night — the less light, the better.

The door squeaked as he entered Moe's tavern. The place hadn't changed at all, the smell, dust and trusty regulars all served as a comforting touchstone for his mind. Moe's regulars had an air of depressive permanence about them and Herman knew most of them — the most forsaken of them — would be sitting in the exact same places on any other night of the week.

To his relief no-one appeared to have noticed his arrival, aside from the man behind the bar, obsessively cleaning a pint glass. As Herman approached the bar he noted that every surface (including the shelf the clean glasses sat on) seemed to be covered in an old, thick layer of dust and alcohol.

"Herman! Ain't seen ya in a while," Moe called out from behind the bar counter. Herman detected a note of surprise in his voice — that made sense, he hadn't been to the tavern, or seen Moe, in a long time.

Speechless and weary (and wary), Herman took a seat at the bar.

"Hey, how's the shop goin'?" Moe continued his attempt to start up conversation.

"Good. I need a beer," he said. Friendliness be damned — tonight Herman wanted to have his beer, get skunk-drunk, and be left alone. The lack of alcohol at his home had necessitated a visit to Moe's — it wasn't a social call.

"... Alright, then."

Herman was unsure if the bartender's offended tone was put on or genuine, but suspected the mainly former with a small amount of the latter. Along with his establishment, it appeared that Moe hadn't changed either. "Ya want a Duff Adequate, Duff Lite or Duff Dry? Bit low on varieties t'night, midweek, ya know," Moe said as he walked towards the taps.

"Dry."

"Good choice," Moe replied, and poured beer from the tap into the glass he held, sending it down the bar to Herman. He caught it in his left hand and studied it. Herman suspected that the tap system needed maintenance, judging by the tall head on the beer — he briefly considered bringing it up, but knowing it wouldn't endear him to Moe he decided against it. It was beer, and right now that was good enough. Herman gulped it down, welcoming the familiar bitter taste.

Raucous laughter reached his ears, catching his attention. The men at the other end of the bar jostled each other in good spirits. There were a few others in the pub, a couple of men playing pool, but they were quiet and his attention was pulled to the group making the most noise. He recognized the three men from a poker group he'd been to once, and secretly hoped they'd keep to themselves.

The loudest and largest man was Homer, Abe's son — Mona's kid. He was a family man, with a wife and two and a half kids, and for some unfathomable reason he worked at the nuclear power plant. Homer was a gullible man, far too trusting for his own good. He must get that from Abe, Herman thought with a wry grin. But he also seemed, for the most part, a good man who cared about his family. Maybe that was from her.

Finishing his beer, he gestured to Moe for another as he continued to watch the men from the other side of the room.

The skinny dark-haired man with a nasally voice and calm eyes was a fellow Springfield NRA member and former chairman. He once gave a strange, passionate speech about semiautomatic rifles and electric eels to the assembly, which Herman had appreciated if only for the looks of confusion it had produced on the other member's faces. He wasn't all there, but then again neither was Herman, so he decided not to judge him too harshly based on that alone.

The other man sitting with them he didn't know as much about, but he'd seen him around, usually with the other skinny guy. This guy was smart — more present than both of his friends — and had proved himself to be a very canny poker player. Herman was very familiar with different methods of cheating at cards, considering himself adept at it, yet frustratingly he hadn't been able to catch him in the act.

No names came to mind for either man. Being only two beers in, Herman chalked it up to tiredness — but then he'd had never been good at names. Pulling his lighter out of his breast pocket, he lit the cigarette dangling from his mouth.

"Hey! No smokin' in here, Herman!" Moe shouted from the other end of the bar, leaning on the counter. The chatter of the patrons lulled as they turned to look at the man Moe was reprimanding.

God, had it been that long since he'd been here? Herman could swear that smoking was allowed indoors at Moe's — encouraged, in fact, because it normally meant Moe sold more beer. Herman sighed, licked his fingers and crushed out the end of the cigarette that was still held between his lips. He was met with a look of disapproval and folded arms from Moe.

"Unlit," he said tersely, pointing at the smoke in his mouth.

Moe narrowed his eyes and nodded, and fell back into conversation with the three men at the other end of the bar. Herman watched as Moe set the glass he'd been cleaning on the shelf behind the bar and he picked up a new glass, starting the process over again as if stuck in a perpetual loop.

"Hey! Guys!" The loud, fat man opposite Moe at the other end of the bar stood up and pointed at Herman. "It's that guy! I haven't seen that guy in ages!"

"Homer, quit yelling," the skinny guy said, jabbing Homer with an elbow.

"What's his name, Carl?" Homer shouted just as loudly as before, now turning to the other man next to him. "The one-armed guy. What's his name again?"

"Homer, use your indoor voice," Carl said, visibly irritated. "You're drunk, man. Moe literally said his name two seconds ago."

Herman took another draft of beer, and decided to help him out. "Herman," he said, still watching the three men carefully.

"Herman! That's right! Hey, didn't we play poker together that one time? And you sold counterfeit jeans out of my car-hole?"

Herman grimaced — it hadn't been one of his prouder moments. "That's me," Herman replied and turned back to his beer.

"Didn't you also try to kidnap me and hold me hostage? Good times," Homer said, sitting down again with the assistance of his friends. He raised his glass. "Well, here's to old friends!" With a gulp, Homer finished his Duff. "More please, Moe."

"Here ya go, Homer," Moe slid him a new glass full of beer, and removed the old one. Homer grabbed the glass, and started chugging.

"So, what brings ya here at this time of night, Herman?" Moe asked. "I ain't seen ya in a hot minute. Ya been livin' as a hermit out in the woods or somethin'?"

"I needed beer," Herman mumbled, and pushed his glass forward again.

"I can see that, ya look like crap, no offense intended," Moe replied, passing him another beer. "Well, I'm askin' because I'm closin' up in 'bout forty-five," He added as he waved at the wall clock behind the counter, showing the time as four twenty-five. "Don't go by that clock though, it's broke. I ain't had time to get a new one yet."

"I'll be quick then." Herman finished the beer quickly, wiped his mouth with a sleeve and pushed the empty mug forward. Moe looked at him suspiciously.

"Ya know... I know I'm closin' soon, and heck, I'll take ya money, but ya might wanna slow down..." Moe started.

"I didn't ask for your input, Moe."

Moe shrugged in a nonchalant manner, but it meant little — the inquiring look on his face gave his curiosity away. "Fine."

Another pour, another glass drained, followed by another and another and another. Herman lost track of them as he drank each one as quickly as the one preceding it. The chatter of the other patrons had subsided greatly, or maybe the alcohol made him notice it less.

Strangely, it didn't feel like the beer was helping things — his mind kept creeping back to that dream of the trees and valleys and scared faces on men he knew, and men he didn't. He grabbed a handful of peanuts and chewed on one, spitting out the husk and eating the nut inside. It tasted stale and disappointing. When had he last eaten? He stared at a dark whorl in the wooden bar top. This bar counter had been alive and vital, once — part of something bigger than itself...

"Herman. Herman!" A familiar, nasally voice. "Moe's closing up now."

Herman drained the last of his beer and got to his feet. Unsteady, he grabbed at the bar top.

"Hey, Herman!" Moe's voice this time. "Ya alright there?"

Herman thought about it. He couldn't be sure, and maybe it was the beer, but he reckoned was a fair ways from alright. When was the last time someone had asked him that, anyway? Too far back to remember. "Probably," was the answer he settled on.

Somehow Herman made his way from the bar to the doorway without tripping or falling on anyone or anything. The door frame provided a stable place, and it was from there that he watched world spin for a moment, before he pushed the door open with his right shoulder. Outside, a cool breeze touched his face but everything looked bleary and smudged and strange. The heads of the street lamps exploded with starry, gleaming light. He rubbed at his eyes, and felt dampness on the back of his hand.

"Shit's blurry," Herman mumbled.

"Yeah, we all get that sometimes," Moe said. "Ya want a tissue?"

"No?" Herman replied, confused. How would that help? Tearing his eyes away from the lights of the street lamps above them only served to make him feel dizzy and unstable. He tried to focus on Moe, but Moe kept moving around.

"Is there, uh, anyone I can call for ya?"

Herman hesitated a moment, considering Moe's offer. "Nope," he repeated, more surely this time. Attempting to collect himself, he rested against the rough, cold brick exterior of the building. Indistinct chatter and the sound of a car leaving reached his ears. He allowed himself to sit down on the pavement, and found comfort in the concrete solidness of the ground.

_Can't fall if you're already on the ground._

A conversation was happening nearby between two familiar voices. He could only catch brief fragments of it.

"Poor guy. We can't leave him here."

"Yeah, I ain't sure what to do neither." Sounded like Moe.

"We could call Wiggum? They've put me in the cells to sober up before—"

"Nah, I don't think that's gonna help, Lenny... Those two, uh, got bad blood. Ya know, I think he got a unit attached to his shop, like a studio sort of deal. I been there once, it ain't far from here..."

Suddenly there were two pairs of shoes, two pairs of legs standing in front of him. Someone knelt down in front of him.

"Herman?" A gentle voice said. Herman felt light pressure on his shoulder, and instinctively attempted to pull away from it.

"Geddoff," he snapped, exasperated. "Leeme 'lone. Ev'thin's fine, fuckoff—"

"Hey, you can't stay here. We're gonna help you get home—"

"What? Hey, don't drag me into this Lenny, I gotta close up."

"Aw, c'mon Moe—"

"I... Alright. Ya owe me, Lenny. So does he, but I doubt he'll remember that."

Two pairs of hands helped him up, then under his left arm, he felt a shoulder digging in. Another arm went around his back, from his right, and grabbed onto the fabric under his left arm.

"Hey no, geddoff, I gottit—" Herman started, but Moe interrupted him.

"The things I do for ya boozehounds, I don't know..."

"You're a good man, Moe."

Herman heard Moe sigh next to him. "Sure."

Herman panicked as he felt movement next to him, a vague shifting that set him off balance a little and then he found himself pulled in a direction.

"Th' fuck're y' doin'?" He slurred.

"Gettin' ya back to ya place, just calm down," Moe responded.

It wasn't long before he could hear the two men struggling for breath next to him.

"God dammit Lenny, I know ya want to be a good Samaritan but ya could have just called him a cab—"

"No way." Herman could feel Lenny shake his head as they half carried him. "Look at him, Moe. This guy fought in 'Nam! I'm not leaving him there, this is the least we can do for him."

"God dammit..."

The men fell into silence as they headed towards Herman's Military Antiques. Each time Herman stumbled they paused and next to him Lenny shifted, attempting to get leverage by digging his shoulder in more. Struggling, Moe tightened his hold on him too. One of them was wearing some sort of warm cologne and he caught whiffs of it occasionally, mixed in with the faint smell of sweat and the stronger hoppy scent of beer.

The distance spanning the tavern and the shop seemed to be miles. There was no way it was this far to the shop from Moe's. Herman's heart started pounding.

"Wherya takin' me?" Herman asked.

"Your shop," Lenny replied. And then, "we're here."

"Ya got keys?" A gravelly voice brought him back to the present. Swaying, Herman pulled his arm back from around Lenny's neck and dug around in a pocket, pulling out a key chain with too many keys on it.

"Which one is it?" Lenny asked.

"The three's on a ring," Herman mumbled, and held the keys out. They were taken from him by someone, Moe maybe, and after a few minutes of jingling keys and trial and error he eventually heard the door open.

"Good god, how many locks d' ya need for ya door, Herman?"

"More'n three." Shrugging off the hands of the other two men, Herman stumbled through the doorway and grabbed onto one of the display cabinets units next to the door. The men who'd helped him back to the shop stood watching him from the doorway.

Herman eyed them suspiciously, sizing them up, realizing his oversight. He didn't need to be this drunk, it served him no useful purpose and all he'd done was put himself in a defenseless position. Moe he vaguely knew but barely trusted, and Lenny was almost a complete stranger to him. As he realized the disadvantage he was at, Herman staggered back, and something behind him crashed loudly to the floor with a breaking sound. He ignored it, his eyes flitting from one man in front of him to the other.

Keep it together. Appear strong when you're weak, he reminded himself.

"You okay?" Lenny said with concern in his eyes, moving towards Herman.

Moe put a hand on his shoulder. "Lenny, I wouldn't—"

"I know where every single fuckin' weapon is'n this place," Herman spat as his hands grasped for something, anything, to arm himself with. "Dun'even think 'bout tryin' shit."

"Lenny, this is just like that time that raccoon got stuck under the sink at the tavern and Barney tried to get it out," Moe said in exasperation. "He'll claw ya eyes out if ya get any closer. Or shoot ya."

Lenny either didn't hear Moe or chose to ignore him as he continued forward, his hands raised in placation. "We don't want trouble Herman. We just wanted to help."

"Why?" Herman asked suspiciously, his chest rising and falling irregularly.

_All actions are self-serving, there is no such thing as selfless kindness and to rely on others is to play a dangerous game._

As far as Herman was concerned, there were no exceptions to these rules, so why had he allowed himself to become so susceptible?

"Because you needed it," Lenny replied matter-of-factly.

Herman frowned. He didn't need help, what was this man talking about? And was that a look of pity on his face? Fuck this guy if he thought he was better than him.  
"Don't y'fuckin' pity me," he growled, anger sparked. He'd fight if he needed to. "Y' fixin' for a fight? Y'gonna get one."

"Lenny, leave him—"

"I know how you feel."

Herman glared at him — he fucking doubted it. Lenny stepped inside the shop, walking to where Herman was. He stood opposite him, leaning back on the display cabinet. "Drinking lets me turn off my brain for a bit. You know, have a break from things. It helps but I don't think it fixes anything."

Herman looked over to Moe, who looked confused and uneasy and was very quiet.

"The hell're y' talkin' 'bout?" Herman asked, watching the man opposite him carefully. Lenny took in a deep breath.

"When I came back from Kuwait people told me I was a hero. I don't feel like a hero. Sometimes I think, if Ca—" he faltered and even though he was drunk Herman spotted a quick flash of panic on his face. Lenny's eyes shot over to Moe and he cleared his throat. "I feel like a fraud, Herman. The alcohol helps but I keep remembering those black skies and the oil falling from them like rain and... finding people beyond help. Gone. Beer dissolves those memories a bit. You know what I mean?" Lenny dipped his eyes, arms crossed, and swallowed hard. "Please say you do. It can't just be me."

Silent, Lenny lowered his head and turned his unfocused gaze to the floor. The words penetrated through his drunken fog and hit Herman hard. He knew the feeling intimately, but he'd never put it into words because he'd never needed or wanted to. Lenny certainly wasn't alone, but even on a good day Herman couldn't handle this kind of talk — and especially not right now, when he was wasted and wanted to be as far away as possible from the subject of war and death. His hand shook as he pulled a cigarette from the breast pocket of his vest and he lit it, taking a long drag and holding his breath.

Herman exhaled the smoke with a hiss, staring on the opposite wall, behind Lenny. "Y'need ta leave," he croaked.

A moment passed between them, Lenny 's head still dipped while Moe stared at Herman in confusion from outside. "What?"

"Git outta here," he said, more deliberately now and with a hint of menace. The words hung in the air between them both. He saw Lenny flinch out of the corner of his eye.

"Hey, there's no need ta be like that," Moe said defensively, entering the shop with a scowl. "The man's just tryin' ta help—"

Herman glowered at Moe. "Never requested no-one's help, not yours nor his. I told y'all." He made sure to enunciate the last part well, so they could understand. "Get. Gone."

"Just 'cause ya don't want help don't mean ya don't need it, ya ornery bastard—"

"It's alright, Moe," Lenny murmured, turning to leave. "Just leave him."

The faintly wounded tone in Lenny's voice cut through Herman's anger and in a moment of clarity, he realized he'd just unceremoniously brushed off a man — a fellow soldier, from the sounds of it — who was only trying to reach out.

"Hey." Herman said with a sigh, interrupting Lenny as he was leaving for the door, causing him to turn around. "M'sorry 'bout it." He felt his lip quiver involuntarily, and pulled a cigarette out of his pocket. "Smoke for the road?"

Half-smiling, Lenny nodded slightly. Herman passed it to Lenny along with the lighter.

"Thanks," Lenny said, the smallest amount of warmth creeping back into his eyes. He put the cigarette in his mouth, as he struck the lighter it illuminated his face. For a split second he reminded Herman of a young man from his company, a kind and loyal man — the kind of guy who didn't have the countenance for war. But then, Herman had known a few men like that. He'd wanted to study history, just like Herman, when he got back home. He was from Louisiana.

He winced remembering how the young soldier, his friend, had put a gun in his own mouth and pulled the trigger. Herman found him the next day when he went to ask if he could borrow a heat tab. It wasn't just the enemy without that had been a threat.

Lenny passed the lighter back to him and inhaled. Lenny wasn't him. "See you around, Herman." He rejoined Moe outside the shop and he was gone.

Herman gingerly got off the cabinet he'd been clinging to and reached the door with keys in hand. Wasted or not, he'd be damned if he'd ever leave his door unlocked, ever. He reached the door in time to spot both Moe and Lenny through the metal bars of his shop windows as they wandered off down the street, Moe's arm around Lenny. Herman watched them go, the small light at the end of Lenny's cigarette becoming less and less visible until his eyes could no longer track it.


	2. 501

—

_I feel empty inside, nauseous._

_I am frightened._

_As though speaking to a stranger, I say:_

_"My God, I am wounded."_

— Gregory Smith, 'Generals Die in Bed'

—

Herman awoke with mumbled nonsense pouring out of his mouth long before he was fully aware of it. The words were muddled and disconnected and unclear, almost as if they'd traveled a long way before leaving his mouth and had somehow become garbled and lost in their journey, with some arriving sooner than others.

His head felt strange, his body felt weird — both felt disconnected and as if they were floating away from each other. His eyes hurt — Herman realized there were bright lights pointed directly at him — and wherever he was smelt hostile, like chemicals and blood and metal.

Together, along with the noise of what he hoped were people around him, all of it simultaneously confused him and made him irritated and panicky.

His gun. Where was his gun?

"Where am I?" Except he hadn't said that — all he'd managed to do was make a wretched noise that didn't sound like anything. His irrational hope that someone, anyone, had somehow understood him was crushed as the question went unanswered; instead, a figure towered over where he lay, and spoke words that he didn't understand — replying with something that wasn't an answer — as a heavy hand rested on his shoulder.

"Where am I?" More desperate, meaningless garbage left his mouth, and he started to panic, his heart pounding in his chest with the slow realization that he'd been drugged.

_They've drugged you. They finally have you. You're a prisoner of war, and you're at their mercy — oh God, they've got you, and they're going to torture you and you'll die a prisoner, you'll never go back home again… _

Herman's panic rose as he fought for consciousness, trying to pull his mind out of the pit it was stuck in.

The person above Herman spoke again.

Calm down.

Those two words somehow burrowed through the fog. He recognized these words, and clung to them, registered them — but they didn't help.

Herman didn't understand. How the fuck could he calm down when he didn't even know where he was?

"Why am I here?" He tried again, but it came out as a distressed whine. The hand on his shoulder increased its grip, clinging firmly to him — he fought desperately to free himself.

"Calm down." Why? What was going to happen to him? Then an aside, spoken lowly to someone nearby — "Poor bastard."

The ceiling was bright, with rails and strange shapes hanging from it — above him, the shapes seemed to change and distort — and he couldn't breathe. It was so hot, like he was a kid again and it was the middle of summer in Texas, and the sound of people all around him was now overwhelming and unavoidable…

Why was he in a crowded room? Was he even in a room? Was he in hell? Herman hadn't truly believed in Hell for a very long time, but if he wasn't in Hell, he must be somewhere not too far removed from it.

"What's happenin'?" He asked and this time, his mouth was co-operating more — this time, he sort of made sense. Herman turned his head to see what was happening, who they were.

Were they people? With a chill, Herman had the thought that maybe they weren't from this world. Maybe they were aliens. And, as one of them grasped his other shoulder and pushed it down onto wherever he was laying, Herman thought that maybe that was why they wouldn't let him look at their faces. He could feel his heart starting to thump hard. He couldn't breathe properly. What had they done to him?

"What are you doin' to me?" He was more comprehensible this time.

"He's becoming distressed." The weight on his shoulders was heavier now. It was horrible, and he was aware of a presence at the foot of… He was lying down… A bed. Or a table? The they were at the foot of wherever he was, on whatever he was laying on, standing by his feet. He tried to sit up, and was again pushed back down — but he'd managed to catch a glimpse of them, and was chilled because none of them had faces — there were three, maybe four of them, and they had eyes, but they had no face—

"Lie down," a female voice, a familiar voice, commanded him. It was the voice of someone he'd been close to, once — more than once — that voice, he knew it, and would have known it anywhere.

"Mona?"

"Someone get him some more ketamine."

Why was she here? Had they taken her, too? Someone was crying — he could hear them weeping — but he had no idea where the hell they were. Was that her? Or was that a different woman, a different mother, somewhere out there? Did that woman, that unknown mother, hate him, too? Did she know what he'd done? He'd only been trying to help. Surely Mona would understand.

But Mona — no, she couldn't be here. It was too dangerous, it wasn't safe. Why was she here?

The things around him argued loudly, and despite the volume they spoke at he could only pick out a few words.

You didn't give him enough. Look at him, he's in pain… Look at the state of him, look at how messed up he is — poor guy, have to do something, getting agitated, hallucinating…

"Let her go," he demanded, because even if she hated him for what he'd done, she was Mona and she couldn't be here, it wasn't safe. The hands on his shoulders shifted, and Herman wrestled free taking a swinging punch at his abductors with his right hand, but nothing connected.

Herman felt confused — his arm was unrestrained, he could feel how it wasn't held down or restrained like his left. He yelled, and tried again — but nothing happened — _why?_ — and so he looked down.

_Nothing._ There was no right arm. Herman stared at where it should have been.

They must have taken it. Herman was breathing quickly now, his heart was pounding and even though he was lying down he felt dizzy and sick.

_Your arm is _missing_. They took it, and they'll do the same thing to Mona too... You have to get out, escape, _right now_, or they'll torture you, they'll take your other arm, and your legs, and you'll never be able to leave, you'll be here, helpless, forever…_

"No, no no no…"

Then something roughly grabbed his head, something else grabbed his shoulders again, and pushed him down, and wrenched his head around so he that he was staring at that god-damned glinting hellish ceiling again. He twisted his head back in an attempt to look at his arm, to try to figure out where the fuck his arm was, why wasn't it there — maybe he missed it, maybe it was there, maybe he'd been seeing things, or he was confused — he _felt_ confused, confused and lost…

"Fuck you," he spat. The hands holding his head slipped and suddenly one was in front of his face, in his way — fuck those bastards for taking his _arm, his arm!_ — he bit down, hard, and a yowl of pain erupted from above his head.

"God damn son of a bitch! He bit my fucking thumb!"

"The fuck was your thumb doing in his mouth? Just get that ketamine into him!"

"I have, just give it a second!"

"Let me go!" Herman hollered, fighting with the meager remnants of whatever strength he had — but it didn't last long as gradually, inexplicably, a heaviness settled over his body like a thick blanket and sapped whatever energy he had, replacing it with fatigue.

He felt tired, the fight dissolved from him, and there was nothing he could do except cry 'help', until his mouth stopped co-operating again. His vision closed, as if he was looking through a tunnel; he felt himself fall, but he knew that those things — people, aliens, whatever — were still there, still around him.

And they'd taken his fucking arm.

He could see and hear them and didn't know what they were saying, but he knew he was in danger. He couldn't fight, and so he just stared back out at the ceiling from the hole he was in, immobile and afraid and pissed off about his arm. Everything echoed, even his own thoughts, and he felt as if he was floating.

Where was he?

"What's his name?"

"Hermann."

"Hermann." A hand touched his shoulder, but this one was different — it didn't attempt to restrain him, and simply sat there. The voice was a dry, painful croak: it, and the hand on his shoulder, did not belong to Mona. It was different — all he wanted was for Mona to come back.

"You can calm down now, Hermann — God, they really have you strapped in... You're in the army hospital at Da Nang. We're in good hands here."

Da Nang. Where was the rest of his platoon? A tear pooled in the corner of Herman's eye, collected there — he closed his eyes and it slid down his face. But he was unable to raise his hands — no, not his hands, his _hand_ — to wipe it away.

His hand. He had only one arm. They took his fucking arm.

The faceless… _things_… who had been around him before had either disappeared or had gone very silent. Herman sniffled, felt something — fingers — running through his hair, from the crown down past his ear.

"They got us. They'll look after us here."

He wanted to tell this person next to him that he wanted to go home, wanted to ask why he had no right arm, but his lips wouldn't move. He tried to turn his head, but he couldn't — why couldn't he? — and more tears of frustration ran down his face.

Thankfully, whoever it was who was with him wiped them away for him — "hey, don't cry" — and then they leaned over Herman and stared at him.

Herman wasn't sure who he'd been expecting to see, but it hadn't been the face that had come into view — that of a young American soldier, maybe the same age as Herman, maybe a little younger.

The sight of him was enough to make Herman relax a little. _At least you're not the only soldier here, _he told himself._ Maybe he's telling the truth._

Aside from the bandage wrapped around his neck, Herman didn't think he looked sick enough to be at a hospital — a bit sweaty, but it was Vietnam, who wasn't? — however, the longer he looked at him, the more Herman noticed the unnerving dissonance between the expression of his mouth and eyes. It seemed to him as if this man knew how to smile, and wanted to, but could only manage a shallow mimicry; his wide, brown eyes were haunted and distant, and he didn't blink.

Herman had seen men wear the same expression before, and the more he looked at the man leaning over him, trying to console Herman with hollow eyes and a desperate smile, the more Herman knew the soldier couldn't be fully present.

"We're lucky to be here, doncha know. They'll do everything they can for you here. They really will. So just calm down and hang in there, buddy. You're safe here. You're safe."

The tone was calming but Herman felt like he wasn't talking to him — as if it was someone else he was addressing, someone who just happened to occupy the same space as Herman, who temporarily had the same face and body as him. Maybe, he thought, he was talking to himself as much as he was to Herman.

"Get back to your cot, Gladwell. Stop harassing the poor guy."

The guy frowned, and looked away from Herman. "They k-holed him," he snapped hoarsely, addressing someone to Herman's right. "They dropped him into a k-hole, can't you see he's freaking out? Look, come over here, look at him—"

"Since when did you become a medic, Gladwell? Huh?"

The man above Herman frowned, looked back down at Herman with an expression of concern.

"Quit fucking pawing at him, and get your uppity ass back to your cot. And stop talking back to me — I'm starting to regret closing up that hole in your throat."

The blond man grimaced, then turned away — regrettably, the fingers left Herman's hair. "You'll be okay," he mumbled, and then his hand left Herman's shoulder.

After staring at the bright ceiling with the rails and bags hanging from it for a very long time, trying to figure out what 'you'll be okay' really meant, Herman melted into the bed and drifted off back to sleep.


	3. Right you are

—

_Thus we live a closed, hard existence of the utmost superﬁciality, and rarely does an incident strike out a spark. But then unexpectedly a ﬂame of grievous and terrible yearning ﬂares up._

_Those are the dangerous moments. They show us that the adjustment is only artiﬁcial, that it is not simple rest, but sharpest struggle for rest._

― Erich Maria Remarque, 'All Quiet on the Western Front'

—

Finally at ten minutes past eleven the next day Herman regained consciousness, slumped against the display cabinet.

A woven fabric, dusty, musty and heavy, covered his face. Unbidden images of bright lights and faceless figures and missing limbs made their way into his head.

Frenzied, he struggled against the material and freed his head. As Herman gasped for breath, he slowly realized that he was wrapped in the sun-faded replica confederate flag that usually hung on the wall behind the counter.

He rested back on the glass door of the cabinet, groaning and shifting a little, and finding a cool place for his head to lie. The morning light was too bright for him and he pulled the flag back up over his head. He was almost asleep again when the loud banging on his shop door began.

His eyes snapped open. Reflexively he pressed himself against the side of the cabinet, keeping low. Who could it be? He wondered, left hand navigating the folds of the flag to rest upon the Bowie knife he carried in his jacket — that surprised him, he'd been expecting to find his Colt there, but then he remembered — he's been at Moe's, and he didn't like bringing it there. A knife, though, was better than nothing — but still, he looked across the room wistfully at the firearms on the opposite wall.

The pounding on the door continued, and he winced at the sound. It had to be the authorities, he reasoned through the fog of his hangover. The only question was which ones? If he was lucky, it was the ever-bumbling Springfield PD, if he was unlucky — and he often was — it was the FBI or CIA. Either way, he wouldn't go down without a fight though, if they thought he'd go easily they were mistaken! Herman quietly and quickly got to his knees and turned around to look outside, peering cautiously over the top of the display cabinet.

"God damn it, Abe!" He shouted at the old man pounding his fists on the door. The man stopped and cupped his hands around eyes. Spotting Herman he shuffled over to stand in front of the window opposite the cabinet.

"Herman!" Abe's voice was muffled but audible through the glass. "Quit goofing around! Open up!"

Cursing the old man under his breath, Herman got to his feet, grabbing onto the display cabinet to steady himself. It wobbled, and something fell off it and crashed to the floor. A glance at the floor confirmed this — a miniature replica ship of the Battleship New Jersey lay wrecked on the hardwood floor next to a small pile of glass. Herman recognized it as an old civil war lachrymatory he'd forgotten to put somewhere better after he'd unpacked it a week ago.

"Fuck." With a frown, Herman prodded the pile of broken goods with his boot and pulled a smoke from his pocket. He turned away and walked over to the door, pulling the keys from his pocket and unlocking the door but leaving the chain connected. Turning and pulling the handle, he peered around the partly open door, squinting and shading his eyes from the bright light outside with the cigarette held between his fingers.

"What d'you want Abe?" His throat felt dry and sore and the words croaked, catching on the way out of his mouth.

"Your sign says you open at ten. Why aren't you open?" Abe Simpson complained, arms crossed, a slippered foot tapping impatiently.

Herman sniffed, feeling the morning phlegm shift in his sinuses, and cleared his throat. He closed his eyes and rolled his head to one side then the other, hearing the vertebrae in his stiff neck make a satisfying crack. "Slipped my mind. I'll open in fifteen mi—"

"Fifteen minutes!" Abe shouted back at him from a foot away, and Herman winced at the unnecessary loudness of his voice. "Who do you think I am, a man with time to kill?"

Frustrated, Herman sighed and surveyed the man in front of him. If right now the path of least resistance meant letting Abe in, then so be it.

"Alright. Come in," he growled through gritted teeth and reluctantly undid the door chain, door swinging open. "Slept through my alarm," he added as Abe passed him.

"Quit bumping gums Herman, I saw you sleeping on the floor over there." Abe countered sharply, pointing at the discarded flag on the ground.

Pride wounded slightly, Herman snorted. "It ain't untrue," he grumbled and held the cigarette in his mouth "Couldn't hear the alarm from out here."

Abe ignored his response as his eyes scanned the store. "Do you sell buttons? Or bolo ties?" He asked, picking up an old brass sextant off the shelf. "I need a prescription filled."

"No to all," Herman replied, closing the door. His head throbbed and it made each laborious step a chore. Eventually he reached the shop counter and opened the top drawer, pulling out a half-finished box of painkillers. "Although it depends on the prescription."

"Laxatives?"

"Afraid not." Herman lit the cigarette in his mouth and took a deep drag on it, feeling himself relax. There was nothing like the first smoke of the morning to take the edge off the day. He removed a couple of pills from their foil packet and popped them in his mouth, but without a glass of water he was reduced to dry swallowing them. With his dry mouth unable to produce enough saliva, the pills stuck in his throat, and produced a bitter taste that crept up his tongue and almost made him retch.

Abe didn't seem to notice Herman's distress, and he continued. "That's a shame. Well, I remember in the forties you could buy a bolo tie anywhere. We called 'em shoe strings, which was confusing because you had shoe laces, which were what we called pipe cleaners. No-one used pipe cleaners, unless you were a chimney sweep, or a prostitute. I was a chimney sweep once..."

"Sure." The smoke, now half-hanging out of his mouth, had tempered Herman's mood slightly but not enough, and he felt irritable and sluggish and old. His head hurt, the morning was too bright and loud and brash for him, and all he wanted was for Abe to take himself someplace else.

Inhaling deeply, hopeful that nicotine would pull through and lend him strength, he selected a store copy of the most recent issue of the military auction magazine he regularly stocked. Flicking through its glossy pages a picture caught his eye — a nineteenth century walnut stock shotgun with elegant lines and finely engraved stock detail. The print underneath the photo disclosing the provenance of the gun was blurry, the words clumping together as Herman squinted at the page. Attempting to read it made his head hurt worse, so he dog-eared it for later and flicked to another page.

"... and those prostitutes are why they stopped charging licensing fees for growing citrus fruits." Abe paused and peered at Herman. "Why were you sleeping on the floor?"

"Couldn't find the bed in time," Herman replied, glancing up from his magazine.

"Oh! Exciting night on the town then, eh?" Abe asked, wiggling his eyebrows and giving him a knowing chuckle. "Out chasing skirt, huh? You rascal!"

"Mm. No." According to his memory of last night, he'd got legless at Moe's and had been carried home by Moe and Lenny. It hadn't exactly been glamorous or risque. He couldn't recall a large chunk of the evening, but he did remember telling them in no uncertain terms to get lost. He knew they deserved an apology, but Herman also knew in his heart how unlikely it was that he'd ever bring up the whole embarrassing evening with them again.

"No, nothing that exciting, Abe," Herman added simply, trying to turn his attention back to the magazine in front of him. "Wasn't chasin' anythin' or anyone last night."

"That's a crying shame. I was hoping you'd have a good reason for looking like a hobo," Abe replied, crossing his arms.

"Thanks Abe," Herman closed the magazine and gave him a pointed look, tapping his fingers on the counter. "You done, or is there anythin' I can help you with today?"

"I told you, I'm looking for buttons or a bolo."

Herman shook his head. "And I told you, I don't have those. Maybe try Grandma's World. Or, online."

"Online! What the hell is that?" Abe asked.

"Online, Abe. The Internet."

"What the— How the hell will I know what I'm buying if I can't see it?"

"Get your grandson Bart to show you. I'm takin' a short day."

"What— Hey, that's no way to run a business!" Abe said, frowning. "Telling me to shop somewhere else? That's not like you! Normally you try to sell me whatever crap you can get your mitts on. What's gotten into you?"

Herman's eyes went from the abandoned flag to the jumble of helmets laying strewn across the floor from the previous night. Abe was right. Normally Herman was on his best behavior with him, since he was such an easy customer to sell to. "I had a bad night," he murmured, feeling Abe's eyes on him.

"How come? Did you invest in a timeshare vacation condo? Get married in Vegas? Homer got married in Vegas once too, but I don't know how legally binding that was. I remember Marge sure wasn't keen when she found out, or on the condo for that matter, pity if you ask me, a tropical vacation would be nice this time of year..."

Herman shook his head. "No. I ain't sleepin' right."

"That's easy, go see a doctor! They've got all sorts of miracle pills these days! I should know, I'm on most of 'em," Abe said proudly.

"No. I don't do doctors. They're all crooks. Only out for themselves, the government, and Big Pharma," Herman declared, counting off each of the offending parties on his fingers.

Abe shrugged. "Well, it's your loss, more drugs for me," he said, and went back to looking at items, this time inspecting an old khaki footlocker from the Korean War. Perhaps the old man had a point. Herman's health was suffering and his patience was wearing thin from the lack of sleep. Maybe it was worth placing his trust in medicine again, just once? Like Herman, Abe had once been a soldier too and that meant he'd also seen some shit — much like Herman had. The past didn't seem to trouble Abe as much as it did Herman, and for the most part he appeared to be living a normal, if lonely, life. For that matter, nothing really seemed to bother Abe at all.

A part of Herman wished he could be like Abe, blissfully unaware of the dangers that lurked around every corner daily. Herman had always been cautious, alert, and suspicious, and had become more so since Vietnam. He supposed he'd probably never change. The things he couldn't see had always scared him the most, like men hiding in the trees and shady government agencies. Homer, Abe's son, appeared to be an ignorant and happy man too, and seemed to like it that way. Yes, that was a trait definitely inherited from Abe. It certainly wasn't from Mona.

_Mona. _He fought back the small, stupid smile that had started to creep onto his face. She'd been reappearing in his thoughts a lot, lately. He'd always admired her, initially from afar, for her strength and perseverance and ability to deal with both Homer and Abe.

Mona wasn't the kind of woman to take things at face value, she knew to look deeper than the surface. She was wild, a firecracker, a revolutionary. She was an idealist, but she didn't just stop at dreaming about how things could be, no — she followed through and —

"What's with that queer look on your face, Herman? What are you thinking about?"

_Mona. _"Nothin'," he said aloud, the words erupting from him a little too quickly.

Abe surveyed his face long enough for it to make Herman nervous. Herman had strange thoughts, more than occasionally, and normally he could dismiss them as such. But in that moment, a terrifying notion popped into his head.

_Stop it. He can't read your mind! _

"Well," Abe finally said, "I'd better leave. You're obviously not interested in making any moolah, Herman." Abe said and turned his back on him, wandering out of the shop, and Herman felt relieved to see him go.

"Oh, and get this door fixed. Someone's cracked the window."

Herman waved goodbye to the old man as he left. The shop fell silent as the door closed behind him, and like so many times before, Herman's eyes drifted over to the corner of his shop that featured a stack of rolled up maps.

Originally, when he'd first arrived in Springfield during the late Sixties, Herman had considered the city as nothing more than another place to pass through on his way to somewhere — preferably as far away from his old home as he could get. But there was something about the city that appealed to him, and staying had felt just right.

Out of necessity, Herman sought a job and found one at the only pet shop in Springfield — housed back then in the building Herman now owned.

On the morning he first met her he'd been at work and suffering from a bad hangover. Mona came into the store, with her son clinging onto her hand. His eyes had lighted on her and the child, and the two had gone and stood in that same spot where his old maps were now, looking at the puppy pen in the corner. Homer was excited, chattering enthusiastically, but his mother looked tired, as if there was a heavy weight sitting on her shoulders that was slowly crushing her to death and she'd accepted her fate.

Herman recognized the look. When he got like that he tried to bury it under alcohol and drugs, but somehow seeing it in her had made it more poignant. He wondered what she did to deal with her black dog.

Half-asleep and feeling dusty from the previous night, Herman had approached them and she'd smiled but it was false and put on, just like the smile on his own face. He saw the dark rings under her eyes and the specter of unhappiness that plagued her expression. She told Herman they were there to get a puppy for Homer, it was his sixth birthday coming up soon. Herman thought it was sweet that she cared so much for Homer — she'd seemed to have never-ending patience with him — and as he asked whether Daddy would mind, and she'd pushed her lips into a tight line before replying, saying that Daddy liked animals so surely it'd be alright?

Herman knew Abe, everyone in Springfield did — he was opinionated and prone to anger after drinking — Herman wondered how Mona coped with it, and suspected she didn't.

He should have known better but he'd taken them over to where the puppies were and let young Homer play with them. Homer had been overjoyed, winding the puppies up and letting them tug on his clothing and shoelaces. His mother watched him with a smile on her face, but that dropped away once Herman told her how much a puppy would cost.

"Can we get this one, Mom?" The young boy asked, clutching a brown puppy which licked his face.

"Maybe another time, Homer."

Her tone got to Herman and despite himself he told her they could take a puppy for much less than the asking price. After all, he confided to her, they weren't purebred dogs despite all signage to the contrary. She'd agreed to the new price, Homer had been so happy he'd started crying, and they'd gone away with their new four-footed friend.

Herman's fears of Abe returning the next day and abusing the staff (mainly him) for selling a dog to the two were surprisingly unfounded, and the puppy remained a member of the Simpson family. Every now and then Herman saw Mona walk by the shop with her swiftly growing dog, Bongo, on a lead and every time she saw him she waved through the window and he smiled at her and his heart skipped a little. When she came into the store for dog food or chew toys she seemed to make a point to always go directly to him, and every time she did conversation came easy. People made him nervous, they did back then and they still did now for various reasons, but somehow Mona didn't - at least, not in the same way that others did.

Herman shook his head. He needed to get out of the store, do something. Reliving in the past and daydreaming about Mona was not a productive way to spend his day.

The cigarette in his mouth was now just a smoldering stub, and he held it between his teeth as he went back to the door and locked it. He wandered through the door separating the shop from his living area, to the kitchenette.

Herman didn't own much that wasn't either in his bomb shelter or for sale in the shop, but what else he had was scattered throughout his flat. Clothing and dishes and books on a variety of subjects, from engineering to war to bush-craft with the odd novel thrown in here and there, lay scattered around. As his eyes scanned the mess of his small living quarters, he questioned cleaning the place sometime, but then what was the point? He never had visitors, the mess had never impeded him, and he hadn't got sick yet. Perhaps, he thought wishfully, the exposure to whatever bugs and germs there were cohabiting with him fortified his immune system? He could be doing himself a favor by not cleaning up and not even know it. With a smirk he spat the cigarette butt into the sink filled with stagnant dishwater, and it made a quiet hiss as it fizzled out.

The dishes could be done another day. He walked towards the bathroom.

Now, a shower — _that _would be productive and make him feel better. He reached into the shower and twisted the dial to warm. As was his habit, he opened the medicine cabinet and pulled out a handgun, setting it in the sink, muzzle down.

Just in case. Not that he expected to need it. But, just in case.

Closing the door, he caught sight of himself in one of the shards of mirror that still clung to the front of the cabinet. Abe had been right, he thought, peering at himself. He looked haggard — his skin was gray and his eyes were ringed with tiredness. Everything about himself looked faded and washed out.

Tearing his eyes away, he checked the temperature of the shower with his hand. Finding it comfortable, he stripped and discarded his clothes on the floor of the bathroom, stepping in. Herman rested his head against the cold tiles and let the warm water hit the back of his neck and trickle over him. Slowly he started to wake up and feel a little more alive, the hollow feeling in his stomach and dizzy feeling building in his head reminding him that he hadn't eaten for at least twenty hours.

Food was a way to stave off the inconvenience of hunger. It wasn't something Herman got any pleasure out of consuming, like alcohol or nicotine. Once upon a time he'd found eating enjoyable, but after years of consuming MRE's and not much else he found it difficult to get excited about meals. Food was the fuel that ran the machine. Nothing more, nothing less.

The heat from the shower was getting to him, making his head spin and his mouth water. Herman cranked the faucet onto cold and gritted his teeth, lowering himself to sit on the floor of the shower. He'd done this to himself, and had only himself to blame for the sorry state he was in now.

"You're a masochist," he told himself, staring up with tunnel vision at the cobwebs on the ceiling, and he grinned. He liked the daddy long-legs spiders that made the webs — how awkward and spindly and nervous they were — and he liked spiders in general. He couldn't see any from the shower floor where he sat, but he knew they were up there. He'd heard somewhere, probably at Moe's, that daddy long-legs were venomous but incapable of causing any harm to humans due to their small fangs. Herman didn't know how accurate that was, but if it was true then he felt sorry for the little bastards. The human race as a whole probably deserved some biting. He knew a few people that did.

"You poor fuckers," he said aloud to no-one except the spiders.

The icy water hurt, but it made him feel better, and he closed his eyes and sat there as long as he could handle it before carefully getting to his feet and turning the shower off.

Returning to his room and taking a seat on the bed, he got changed into what he hoped were clean clothes. Maybe he'd go to the bakery, he thought. It wasn't far, and he doubted he could keep down anything other than plain bread.

The weather outside looked good, but these days Herman wasn't one to take chances, and he pulled on a lightweight jacket over his vest and shirt. He checked the right arm of the jacket to make sure it was still pinned up properly. Few things irritated him more than having all of that useless fabric hanging at his side, a constant nagging reminder of his missing limb. Besides, it looked stupid having an empty arm flapping around.

He stuck a replacement smoke in his mouth, unlit, closing the door behind him as he forced himself out into the world that existed outside of his own mind.


	4. Declaration of War

—

_Every person, whether in wartime or not, should keep a pistol and rifle in his house at all times. If a person is not going to protect himself, and wishes the government to do it for him, how can he complain when the government decides to protect itself against him, and executes him?_

— William Powell, 'The Anarchist Cookbook'

—

Herman sat at a small table pushed against the wall and with the curtain from the window over his head he stared outside. Every now and then a car passed by, and the shadows outside danced in a frenzy in their headlights. As the beams left, the shadows took darted back into the deep parts of the night, and settled and became still again.

If he watched close enough, the darkness moved all on its own in the absence of light, forming eddies and swirling currents like thick black smoke.

The moving shadows outside didn't disturb him, though. What did were the noises.

At first there had been the odd rustling of leaves here and there, the sound of something moving around out there. Herman had gone out to a home renovation store and bought one of those humane no-kill traps, the kind that hippies and vegans liked. He was neither hippy nor vegan, but if it was an animal making all that noise — some cat or raccoon or dog poking around out there — he didn't see the point in killing or hurting it. But the last thing he wanted was something getting into his trash, again.

He'd baited the trap and waited. The traps were still empty after two nights, but it felt like he'd been waiting longer. If it was an animal out there it should have been caught by now, two nights was enough time for that. Animals didn't clean up after themselves either, they left things like trails and shit and broken twigs, but when he'd gone to look for it he'd noticed a suspicious lack of animal sign.

It hadn't escaped him, the fact that that most of Springfield thought he was hyper-vigilant and paranoid. A little nuts. Well, that was bullshit. To Herman, there was no such thing as being too attentive, no such thing as a precaution that should not be taken (or at the very least considered). He'd cheated death many times through being aware of what was going on around him.

If that made him paranoid, then so be it.

His caution had paid off when he heard the voices outside earlier that very night, indistinct and muttering in hushed tones. It confirmed to him what he'd feared but half expected — that the noises outside weren't being made by urban wildlife, but by people.

Then began an analysis of his situation. What kind of people were they? It was a question he'd asked himself multiple times before the answer came back to him, almost audibly.

_You know what kind of people are out there, Herman. People with no good intentions. The spooks are watching you again. Why else would anyone be hanging around your window at o-dark-thirty in the morning?_

That voice was right, and so Herman dutifully sat at his small table, quiet and careful and watchful, with his eyes fixed the darkness outside for any movement, his ears open to any sound that might give their position away.

He hadn't heard anything for the last few hours, but he knew they were out there. There was no doubt in that.

As he felt his eyelids threaten to close, Herman stuck his hand out on the table, grasping for the amphetamines he'd got out earlier. He needed to visit Otto soon, he was running low.

Or, God forbid, maybe he should visit a doctor…

_Gun. Coffee mug. Cigarette. Pills._

He threw a pill into his mouth and washed it down with a mouthful of bitter black coffee. Herman normally preferred his pills with alcohol, but the aim here was to stay awake until it was light, and not to get black-out wasted or uncontrollably horny.

Herman couldn't remember the last time he felt fully rested. This strange twilight he found himself in, of being both sleep deprived and uncomfortably alert at the same time, reminded him of his first few weeks in Vietnam. Back then the ever-present fear of being shot while sleeping towered over them all and prevented them from resting fully. With the passing of a few weeks most men became accustomed to it, and then it became normal for them. The soldiers that couldn't adjust quickly didn't last long.

Now he felt like he was being tested again by whoever was out there.

In a bid to stay awake he took the pills, smoked his cigarettes, and drank obscene amounts of black coffee, enough to churn his stomach. As long as it did the job, it was worth the suffering. On nothing more than stimulants, fear, and a few measly hours of sleep snatched here and there, his previous record (set in Vietnam) stood at nearly a full week awake. Right now, he was on track to set a new personal best.

Herman removed the curtain from over his head. From the chair where he sat he could only just make out the time on the digital clock of the oven across the room.

Zero five forty.

Reaching out, his fingers touched the cold barrel of his Colt laying on the table, and he laid his hand on it. Herman reckoned that it was probably the cleanest thing in the room he was sitting in right now, himself included. He'd already taken the gun apart, cleaned it, and put it back together earlier on in the night. It smelt a little like cinnamon now from the gun lubricant he'd used.

His living quarters could be messy, untidy. But not his guns. Herman's guns were always clean. And sometimes they smelt like cinnamon.

His mind yet again drifted back to the war, back to Vietnam. It had been there that he'd seen firsthand what happened when guns weren't maintained.

It had happened during those dark days towards the end of the war, and any combat soldier who wasn't strung out or high was sleep deprived and stressed. Those who were tripping or jonesing for their next fix were no better off than the ones who were sleep deprived, or vice versa. Both were prone to making the same mistakes.

Their situation hadn't been helped by the fact that most of the boonies (including himself) had the same shitty gun that rusted and jammed in the Southeast Asian climate. Or that they'd all been fed the same bullshit, that the rifles were self-cleaning so no maintenance was required. With all of that considered, he couldn't be too harsh on the guy it had happened to. It could have just as easily been any other soldier in their platoon with a squib stuck in his gun. Given a little less sleep and even less luck, Herman could have been that man.

Tap-rack-bang, that's what they'd all been taught, but they all knew you never did it with a jammed M16. Well, that soldier standing next to him had and when he pulled the trigger, the second shot exploded inside the barrel, and bits of metal and plastic went everywhere. Herman quickly became friendly with a chunk of aluminum from the feeders that got embedded in his arm.

Herman didn't know exactly how long it had taken for that soldier next to him to go — after all they were being shot at and his immediate priority was finding cover — but he knew that his death hadn't been instant. A compassionate bullet from out of somewhere put him out of his misery. Sometimes, gone was gone.

Later that evening, as he dug the metal out of his arm with his far-from-sterile knife, praying he wouldn't get jungle rot, Herman was grateful that he hadn't been the one holding that rifle when it'd blown up.

That day drove home an important lesson for Herman — that keeping his gun clean meant one less reason for him to die. He became fastidious about cleaning his firearm, procuring cleaning kits whenever and wherever he could and learning to view his own M16 with a mixture of distrust and disgust. If not for the very real risk of friendly fire from the foreign tracers, and a severe lack of ammo from the airdrops, he would have happily abandoned that godforsaken piece of crap in the bush somewhere and replaced it with a commie AK47. It wasn't a very patriotic stance for him to have, but none of the other boonies really cared because they mostly all felt the same way about their own guns. They all understood that a gun was a gun when you were under fire, and as long as the thing actually worked who the fuck cared where it came from?

As the skies lightened with the dawn, a feeling of exhaustion crept up on him. By the time the earliest larks of Springfield awoke Herman was half asleep and delirious, feeling clammy, shaky, and weak.

Maybe the caffeine and pills hadn't been a good combination. Ten years ago it wouldn't have been a problem for him at all, but maybe that was part of getting old?

Herman was aware he was becoming more desperate in his fight against sleep — or rather, the dreams. With his body starving for want of sleep, he was under no illusion about being able to fight off anything at all in the state he was in. With a sinking feeling he reckoned if the people who were watching him right now wanted to take him away, he probably wouldn't be able to put up much of a fight.

He remembered what Abe had said. Was it finally time for him to see a doctor? Doctors made the long list of people he didn't trust, sharing such a prestigious honor with lawyers, the police, the government, other shopkeepers, trash-men, teachers and, well, most of Springfield.

But, if he was very careful with what he said and did, maybe a visit with a doctor wouldn't be so bad? It could be beneficial, even. As much as he appreciated Otto's services, sourcing medication through back alleys meant eventual mix-ups, and if the way he felt right now was anything to go by he wasn't sure he could handle a surprise 'mystery pill'. If the doctor gave him something to help him sleep at least he'd get some rest, a break from things. All he needed was just a bit of help.

A gun was a gun, as long as it worked.

He put his head back under the curtain and his eyes scanned outside. Light had started to seep into the morning. Still nothing. Pulling away from the window, Herman picked up a cigarette butt from the ashtray. He squashed it and rolled it around across his fingertips.

Desperate times called for desperate measures, and God knew things were getting pretty desperate.

Herman got to his feet with a groan. His back hurt, and his ass had gone numb. Maybe he'd ask the doctor about painkillers too while he was there.

"Better be on your best behavior then," he mumbled, stretching. He grabbed the essentials — cigarettes, lighter, keys, knife — and headed for the door.

**oOo**

"… _Tied to the whippin' post, good lord I feel like I'm dyin'..."_

"_That was Tied to the Whipping Post by The Allman Brothers, goin' out to all you good folks out there that are gettin' ready for work on yet another Monday mornin'. Duane Allman also featured in the album this next song is from, though he joined the recordin' session after it was recorded. From arguably his best album this is our friend Slowhand Clapton, with Bell Bottom Blues."_

A new song started up and Herman yawned and lit the cigarette in his mouth that had been held there, waiting and ready since he started driving. Being awake so long meant he was running out of smokes — a visit to the Kwik-E Mart would soon be in order. He wound down the window and the smoke filtered out, disappearing outside.

Zero seven hundred hours, read his watch on the inside of his wrist. He had no idea when the clinic opened, but figured it'd likely be soon, hopefully within the next half hour.

As if on cue, a blue sedan that looked like it had seen better days pulled up and Herman watched as it parked on the other side of the lot. A minute or so later another car, much newer and much showier, arrived too.

Herman wasn't really a car guy, he never had been but especially not since he lost his arm and had become restricted to driving vehicles with an automatic transmission. He was more of a utility kind of guy, anyway. His automatic single cab pickup was fine, and suited him better than any newer, flasher car.

_"...Do you want to see me crawl across the floor to you? Do you want to hear me beg you to take me back? I'd gladly—"_

Herman turned the radio off.

A woman exited the sedan, and made her way over to the door digging through her bag. Another car arrived, and parked up a few spaces away from Herman. A man got out, and walked over to the woman, who had paused, still at the doors.

Must be another patient, he thought.

The two exchanged words, the woman turning her head towards where Herman and the black car had parked, before going inside, the man following close behind.

Herman wound the window back up, and grabbed his keys and wallet (and smokes and knife, although he expected he wouldn't have an opportunity to use either) before locking the truck. The cold air felt too harsh on his lungs, and he coughed loudly as he made his way to the door.

He cleared his throat one last time, before entering the building. The whole place felt clinical — it put him on edge — and the warm dry breeze from the air conditioning smelt like hand-sanitizer and cheap air freshener.

"I need an appointment," Herman said to the receptionist as he walked over to the desk. He glanced in the waiting room and sure enough, the man from the parking lot was crammed into one of the chairs.

"Hold on, I only just got in." She dumped her bag on the ground, and fired up the computer, looking him up and down. "Been here before?" She drawled, voice nasally and broad. She wasn't an unattractive woman, but her bleary eyes made it clear she'd only just woken up.

"No. Can they see me today?"

Her brows knitted together as she stared at the screen in front of her and her fingers danced across the keyboard, long acrylic nails clicking on the keys.

"Name?" She said with a sigh.

"Herman," he replied quietly. He glanced over his shoulder at the man in the waiting room, who was holding a copy of The Springfield Shopper and watching him, expressionless.

The woman looked up, and sighed again. "Surname too."

The door opened behind Herman, and he turned around to see Doctor Nick wandering through the door, clutching a thermos that presumably held coffee, and hopefully nothing stronger. Nick visited Moe's regularly too, but unlike many of Moe's other patrons he seemed to actually care to some degree about presenting a professional image.

"Last name?" The receptionist repeated, with an offhand wave at Nick.

"Hermann. Same as the first except with an extra 'n'." Herman watched Nick yawn and wander into his office, and hoped he wasn't the only doctor in.

"God, were your parents cruel or what?" She mumbled, keys clicking as she typed his name into the computer. "We need you to fill in this form before the doctor can see you." He was passed a clipboard and a novelty pen covered in smiley faces. Herman frowned at it. "Take a seat. The doctor will see you soon. I doubt you'll need a long appointment."

He took the clipboard pen, taking a seat the waiting room. The chair wasn't comfortable — the foam wasn't thick enough, the dimensions were slightly out, and it had a slight wobble. To his dismay, the other chairs in the room appeared to be identical.

"These seats are crap," the other man in the waiting room said. He was a pretty unfortunate-looking guy with thinning hair and a severe overbite. Since he dwarfed the chair he sat in, it didn't surprise Herman that he hated it. "I hope they bring it up at the next town meeting."

"Hm." Herman found himself unable to bring himself to make small talk with the stranger.

Noticing Herman's reticence, the other man smiled. "Don't worry, I'm here for the doctor," he said with a chuckle, turning his attention back to the Springfield Shopper he held.

Herman shot him a wary look, and filled out the form, periodically glancing back at the man cautiously.

"Mister Herman?" The sound of carpeted footsteps approached, and Herman looked up to see Nick wander into the waiting room, grinning from ear to ear.

Herman returned his smile with a pained grin, but all it seemed to do was make the doctor recoil slightly.

"Oh dear, you look really sick! I hope I can help!" The doctor exclaimed, taking the clipboard from Herman as Herman rose from the seat. "Come with me!"

Herman paused and grasped the arm of the chair in a moment of dizziness, blinking to clear his eyes.

"Are you okay?" The guy in the waiting room asked. Not responding, Herman followed Nick to his office.

Reaching his office, the doctor indicated to a chair with a wave of his hand as he read the form. Upon a quick appraisal of the degrees displayed on the wall, Herman felt fairly sure that at least three were fake. One prominently featured a misspelling of the word 'school'.

Herman tried to steer himself away from thinking about the legitimacy of Doctor Nick's credentials.

"Now tell me, why are you sick today?" The doctor said to him, closing the door and setting the clipboard on his desk.

Herman sat, and his eyes scanned the room. There could be cameras, recording devices hidden in the walls, in the bookshelf. Sure, it was illegal, but the government wasn't above engaging in illegal activity.

_Be careful what you say, Herman._

"I can't sleep."

"Okay," the doctor said with a slow nod. "Well, why not? It's so easy to do! Anyone can sleep, even babies and drunks!" Nick laughed as he took a seat behind his desk. "Also, you put on your form you haven't seen a doctor in over thirty years. What's with that?" Nick leaned forward and folded his hands eagerly, grinning like a goat eating briars.

"I don't trust 'em," Herman said, leaning back and angling himself away from the doctor.

"Neither do I! Wow, we have so much in common," Nick said, peering around his computer. "So maybe we should start with that thing, uh... The general check up," he said, glancing at the back of his hand as he completed his sentence. It didn't inspire confidence.

"Do we have to?" Herman asked. "Can't you just give me somethin' to help me sleep? That's all I want."

"No, I'm afraid we have to do the check up too. The last time we didn't there was a _big_ fuss. Something about someone dying." Nick waved a dismissive hand. "I don't really remember. It was very complicated. But they said we have to do them now, so now we have to do them, sorry!"

"Hmm. Well, the last time I saw a doctor I left a limb behind," Herman added gruffly. "So you'll have to excuse me if I seem a bit hesitant."

Doctor Nick laughed. "Silly" — he looked back at the clipboard for a second — "Herman! I don't want your other arm! Or any of your limbs!" He pointed at Herman's right shoulder. "What happened to that one?"

Herman paused, in thought.

"Bowlin' ball return," Herman replied.

"Wow! That must have been a pretty strong bowling ball return mechanism!" Fascinated, Nick leaned forward and Herman shied away further. "When did that happen?"

"Thirty-somethin' years ago." Herman picked at the chair arm.

Herman saw the quick glance at his medal, and then back at Herman's face, as if trying to discern whether he was telling the truth or not. It didn't look like he was buying Herman's explanation, but after a moment Nick's signature plastered-on grin returned. "Wow, and you never saw another doctor again after that? You're either incredibly healthy, or very very unhealthy!" Nick stated.

"I'm not dead yet, doctor."

"Did they make you a new arm?"

Herman turned his attention away from the man in front of him. The slats on the blinds were half closed and he could see the day outside, it looked pleasant but he knew it'd be cold out there. Still, freezing his ass off outside seemed far more preferable to the cramped and uncomfortable room he was trapped in now. Nick was asking all the wrong questions and there were too many of them. Herman wasn't there because of his missing arm, it was irrelevant. It wasn't the thing keeping him up at night.

Why, he wondered, had he even subjected himself to this?

"Yes. I never wore it," he said. One night in late December of 1973, in a frenzy fueled mainly by beer and loathing, Herman had hurled the thing into Springfield gorge. The hollow clunking noises as it hit rocks on the way down had echoed up to him in the cold air, and he'd laughed like a maniac. He liked to imagine that it was still down there and had been reclaimed by nature, that it had ended up incorporated into a beaver dam or something.

"Well, why not get a new one then?" Nick asked.

"I'd just rather not have one," Herman replied. He'd probably hate the new one too and chances were high it'd join it's predecessor. "You know, I don't like to litter."

Nick looked confused as he typed something on his computer. "Okay... How much arm do you have left?"

"Not much. Can we stop talkin' about it? I'm not here for my arm." Herman shifted in his seat, and crossed his right ankle over his left knee. _Something get me out of here. Fire alarm, earthquake, whatever._

"No, it's important. Plus, I want to see how messed up — I mean, _damaged_ it is." Nick stood up and gestured to the examination table with a disconcerting grin on his face.

"Mm-mm." Herman shook his head, and his nails dug into his palm.

"Aw, come on! Why not?" Nick asked, sounding disappointed. "I am a legitimate doctor, after all." He gestured to the bits of paper on the wall behind him in an attempt to coax Herman into compliance.

Herman shook his head, and resumed staring out of the window.

He knew the questions that would follow if he showed Nick his shoulder. Every time he showed it to anyone, the questions came. _Bowling ball return, huh? You wore it down to a nub drawing comics? Ripped off by a moving vehicle eh? Yeah fucking right. Liar. What's with these scars here on your shoulder and your side, then? Those look like burns. Pretty bad, too. Looks pretty fucked up. Did it hurt? Does it hurt still? How did it happen? Did it happen in Vietnam?_

There was only one response he could really give. _I don't know._

That memory lurked back there in the corner of his mind, not so far away, and it lay in wait for him to go poking around and prodding for it.

Let sleeping dogs lie.

Mercifully and before Nick could question him further, there was a knock at the door.

"Come in!" Nick said cheerfully. The receptionist from the front poked her head around the door.

"That man in the waiting room wants to see you. Says it's urgent," she said, chewing open mouthed and looking at the both of them. "Sorry to interrupt."

Nick got up. "Sorry Herman, I'll be back very soon! Don't you go through my patient files, now!" Quickly waggling a finger at Herman, Nick left the room without waiting for a reply, not bothering to shut the door. As he sat alone in the silent office, Herman watched the two walk down the hallway, then turned his attention to his surroundings

There was something off about this whole visit here. It wasn't one thing that stood out as suspicious to him, but more the combination of little things. The 'degrees' that hung on the wall. The man in the waiting room. Nick himself, obviously mining for information about his arm — something that wasn't relevant to his visit at all.

_Maybe it's not really a doctor's clinic. This could all be a set up, maybe they're working with whoever's watching you. You know, you should check under the desk, just to be sure. That wouldn't be an unusual place for a recording device to be..._

Herman pushed the clipboard off the desk. "Oops," he said, leaning down with some effort and picking the clipboard up off the ground. While he was there, took the opportunity to look up under the desk in front of him, and on hand and knees made his way underneath it.

Nope, nothing—

"Springfield Police Department!"

Herman jumped, hitting his head hard on the underside of the desk. "Ow, fuck!" He hissed, crawling back from under it.

What Herman saw down the hallway made his eyes widen in shock, and he grabbed the desk and hastily got to his feet. The man in the waiting room had wrestled Nick into an arm lock on the floor, with a knee on his back. Nick struggled, but it was clear to Herman he wasn't going to be able to get out of it. His receptionist stared at the two of them, her pink chewing gum visible in her open mouth.

This wasn't good. Without thinking, Herman put a foot on the clipboard and grabbed the form he'd filled out, screwing it up and stuffing it in his pocket.

_Cover your tracks. Get out of here._

Herman crept down the hallway, keeping right.

"Ouch! Hey, this is uncomfortable!" Nick complained into the carpet. "Okay, is there anything I can prescribe to make this go away?"

"Over-prescription is what got you here first place, buddy." The cop was cuffing him now. "Alright, I've got him, want me to bring him out," he said into his radio before grinning at the receptionist and giving her a wink. "Drew the short straw on this one," he said as an aside, before pressing the button on his radio again. "Hey did you guys get me that coffee and donut?"

"Ah, negative Eddie... Lou forgot to remind me. We'll get your coffee and donut on the way back to the station."

Eddie looked downcast.

"I'll get you a coffee and donut!" Nick cried.

Eddie opened his mouth to speak, then paused to consider the offer, and finally he shrugged. "Maybe. We'll see. I need to run it past the chief first—"

Herman backed towards the door, feeling for the exit. He needed to get out.

"We'll send you the bill!" Nick yelled from the floor as he spied Herman and caught his eye.

Herman reached the door, and bolted.

"Hope you feel better soon!" The cop shouted after him, but Herman was already halfway to the truck.

Peeling out of the parking lot, Herman couldn't get out of there fast enough.


	5. Who are you?

—

_It struck him that in moments of crisis one is never fighting against an external enemy, but always against one's own body... On the battlefield, in the torture chamber, on a sinking ship, the issues that you are fighting for are always forgotten, because the body swells up until it fills the universe, and even when you are not paralyzed by fright or screaming with pain, life is a moment-to-moment struggle against hunger or cold or sleeplessness, against a sour stomach or an aching tooth._

― George Orwell, '1984'

—

"Shit, shit…" Herman mumbled, wide eyes flicking up to the truck's rear view mirror periodically. He couldn't see anyone following him, but that was irrelevant. Just because he couldn't see them, that didn't mean they weren't there following him.

The form from the doctor's clinic was still bunched up in his pocket. He made a mental note to himself to burn the paper later, when he got home. After he checked the car for bugs. Because who knew what had happened in the time he'd been away from his car at the clinic?

Herman felt suddenly angry at himself and he chewed on his lip in frustration. Great, now his entire day would need to be spent checking and rechecking that his car hadn't been tampered with.

_You knew better than to go in there! Of course that walk-in clinic hadn't been a safe place to be!_

Herman was shaking. He needed to stop listening to people like Abe, who were so drugged up on meds they had no idea what was really going on around them.

He was lucky. Something terrible could have happened back there. He could have been taken away.

"God damn you and your advice, Abe," he mumbled.

But maybe… A strange thought occurred to Herman. Maybe Abe wanted to get rid of him, have him disappear? Maybe Abe knew more than Herman thought he did.

No, no. Abe was pretty guileless, he wasn't good at hiding things. If he knew, Herman would know. Surely. He was observant. Herman wouldn't miss something like that.

_Except that you might._

Sitting at a stop signal, Herman grabbed his lighter and a smoke, and lit it up. As he grabbed the lighter from the dash his eyes caught sight of the fuel needle sitting at E and the red fuel light lit up.

"Hm. Car's thirsty." He sighed and stared at it, puffing on his cigarette. Fueling up was something he didn't enjoy, and as a result his car tended to run on fumes until he could bring himself to put gas in it again.

Someone behind him beeped.

"Unwad your panties!" He threw a one-fingered salute at the driver behind him through his window and resumed driving.

_Impatient prick._

He pulled up into the nearest station next to a gas pump but stayed inside the car, trying to muster up the courage to leave.

Come on, man. Car needs gas. Get it over and done with, stop being a little bitch…

"Sir?" A teen appeared at his window, his voice muffled through the glass.

Herman opened his door the smallest amount. "What?" He snapped.

"Well, sir... Would you like me to fuel your car for you?"

"Yes. Thanks," Herman said.

The boy looked at him, and rubbed the back of his neck. "You'll need to turn the engine off, sir."

Herman twisted the keys in the ignition.

"And, uh... You'll need to get out and pay..." The teen pointed to the gas station building.

He pulled the lever that opened the fuel flap and got out of the car, closing the car door loudly.

"And we don't allow smoking on the forecourt…" The teen added apprehensively.

"Well Jesus H. Christ, didn't think I lived in a dictatorship." Herman pulled the door open again roughly, and grabbed the cigarette from his mouth and snuffed it out on the dashboard. "That was my last smoke, too."

"Sir, the gas in the pumps is flammable…"

"I'm not an idiot, son," Herman said as he slammed the door again, and the pump attendant winced. Maybe he'd been a bit hard on the kid.

Herman sighed and relaxed his jaw, and pinched the bridge of his nose. Calm down, he told himself. "Look, can you fuel it up when I'm in there? I got somewhere to be. Fifty dollars' worth."

"Alright, sir."

Herman left the kid at the pump and headed inside, sucking the air in through his teeth. He was already sorely missing the cigarette he'd been puffing on less than a minute ago.

Cigarette smoke tasted and smelled far better than gasoline.

The doorbell rang as he entered the convenience store area of the station, and the cashier looked up at him briefly before returning her attention to magazine laid out in front of her.

"Hey." Her name tag said Shauna. He noted a tattoo on her left bicep. God, she couldn't be older than sixteen. Were they letting kids get tattoos that young these days? "Like, what do you want?"

"I'm payin' for pump five, it's fifty dollars. And I'll get some cigarettes." He grabbed a copy of the Springfield Shopper and slapped it on the counter. "That too." The attendant didn't move but gave him a look of annoyance. "Please," he added through gritted teeth.

She sighed and rolled her eyes. "Okay, um… What smokes?" She gestured to the wall behind her.

"Laramies."

"We've got like, ten varieties. Do you want me to read them out to you?"

"I ain't blind," he shot back. "Just the Laramie Extra Tars."

She grabbed a packet and set them down hard on the counter. "Is that all?" She asked.

Herman nodded.

"How much are you paying for on five?"

"Fifty dollars," he said. "I already said."

"Okay, whatever." She frowned as she typed something into the register. "Oh."

"What?" He snapped. "I'm in a hurry."

"Computer's just crashed," she said, letting out a massive sigh. "What a drag."

"I can pay cash," he said, but she shook her head.

"No, I can't put it through without the computer." She disappeared for a moment behind the counter and reappeared. "I have to restart it. God, you think Donny would be able to afford better computers," she added as she grabbed her magazine again.

This was too much. Normally he'd just leave, but he was stranded without gas. Herman leaned against the counter, and rubbed his eyes. "So I can't pay cash?"

"Um? I already said?" Shauna flicked a page over, and looked back up at him. "What, do you expect me to make small talk with you while this thing restarts? Um, no."

Herman turned away from the counter, stayed leaning up against it. Despite what he'd hoped the inside the gas station stank of gasoline, and that smell reminded him of things he did not want to be reminded of, and he was having trouble breathing—

"Do you have a bathroom?" he asked.

She nodded and without her eyes leaving the page in front of her she passed him a set of keys. "They're around the side." She pointed in a vague direction. "Oh my God there's an article in here about Ranier Wolfcastle — no way…"

"I'll be back soon."

She didn't say anything but waved a dismissive hand at him.

Exiting the building, he noticed that a few other cars had pulled up and parked at other pumps. The attendant who'd finished pumping gas into Herman's car had apparently finished and was now talking to another customer.

The smell of gasoline hit him hard as he accidentally breathed in through his nose. It produced the same panicky reaction in him that it always did, but if he could just get somewhere quiet and calm he'd be okay…

Herman made his way over to where she had directed and locating the bathrooms he somehow managed to get the key in the lock. Inside, he leaned against the the door.

It didn't smell like gasoline in there, but the smell lingered on in his brain. He could feel himself becoming gripped by fear.

No, he told himself, taking a deep breath in, and letting it out. Remember. It's not the same. You're not the same. You're safe…

_Just calm down and hang in there. You're safe here, you're safe. You'll be okay_…

That shit had been so flammable. And it stuck, and it burned far hotter than normal fire. The nausea built up inside him and with tunnel vision he walked over to one of the stalls.

The only way to put it out was to smother it, starve it or oxygen, and even then that was beyond painful. Not only did the stuff itself stink, but so did the flesh it burned—

Next moment he was on his knees bent over a toilet bowl, emptying the meager contents of his stomach.

Herman could see the black and red burns as vividly as if they were in front of him, could hear screams for help and he didn't know where they came from but it couldn't be far, someone needed help, but he was stuck, unable to move.

Suddenly feeling overwhelmingly hot, Herman started sweating, and he grasped his right shoulder in his left hand. If you got that shit on you, napalm or phosphorus for that matter, no-one could help. If it touched you, if you were standing in the wrong place at the wrong time, you became human kindling.

Herman had decided early on that if he ever got that sticky fire on him that he would put his own gun to his head, he'd figured that would be a more peaceful way to go. But then after being there a while and seeing what it did, he realized that he probably wouldn't still have his gun if he was burning up like that. The next best thing, he'd realized at the time, was a mercy killing. Herman knew all too well that mercy killings weren't merciful for the men who had to help expectants on their way out.

Thankfully, the air drops were becoming less frequent by the time that he got there, but they were still regular. They still happened but it was no longer under the pretense of deforestation — which made sense, not a lot of the jungle was left where he'd been stationed. It was all tactical, that was what said in defense of the air strikes, but what in the way of tactical advantage could small villages of civilians possibly offer Charlie?

Most of the napalm came from drops, mixed with thermite and phosphorus (which were arguably just as devastating), much less of it from flamethrower operators or tanks. The flamethrower guys, they had a lifespan of about four minutes, since they were highly visible, and so most soldiers tended to avoid their use especially toward the end of the war. But Herman knew that some still had.

The tanks that used napalm, those were fearsome, with streams of flame spewing forth from their turrets — they were much safer than individual operators, but much more clumsy. He'd seen them, maybe once or twice, and they were both formidable and spectacular to behold as they lumbered through the bush and blasted sticky fire everywhere.

Afterward, the smoke lifted from the ground like the mist on a Summer morning back home.

But burning foliage was one thing, flesh entirely another. Like the way that napalm and phosphorus stuck to the skin, the memory of the smell of cooking flesh stuck with those who had first hand experience of it. It was part of the reason Herman joined the Insectivorian Society, because bugs didn't smell like people when you cooked them. And then there was that potent smell of gasoline—

He retched again, but nothing came up except bitter bile. His eyes watered and he wiped his hand with his mouth. Sitting with his back to one of the walls, he felt a pang of pain in his stomach.

He didn't know how long he'd been sitting there on the ground with his eyes fixed on a crack in the tiles on the wall next to him, or how long the knocking had been going on before he noticed it.

"Sir? Are you OK?" It was the squeaky voice of the gas pump attendant.

"Get lost," Herman shouted back hoarsely, but the words had snapped him back to the present. Secretly, he was appreciative for the concern.

For the most part, the moment had passed. Herman still didn't feel like he was completely back and still felt confused, but he couldn't spend all day on the floor of a gas station toilet — as much as he might want to.

He got to his feet, flushed the toilet and washed his hand and his face as best he could.

Movement caught his eye in the mirror, so he looked up, and really wished he hadn't. His eyes were red and his face was pale and he looked gaunt and unwell. It didn't feel or look like him in the mirror, and it scared him.

"Who the fuck are you?" He mumbled. The image in the mirror moved its lips as Herman spoke and confirming for him that yes, that person really was him.

"Sir?" The knocking commenced again. "Sir, there's a queue."

"Oh for fucks sake..." He mumbled, drying his face with a paper towel from the dispenser and tossing it on the ground.

Opening the door he saw a line of three people waiting outside, along with the attendant.

"Here's your keys," he grumbled, and shoved them at the attendant as he made his way past the line.

"Are you okay, sir?" the attendant asked, concerned. "You look pale..."

"I'm fine," he said, avoiding their eyes because he knew how he looked, and there was no way that they weren't silently judging him. He shivered, suddenly feeling chilled by the wind cutting through his clothes to the sweat on his skin. The sky had clouded over and everything looked gray, blending into the concrete of the forecourt.

The doorbells rang again as he reentered the shop, he went over to the counter.

"You look like crap," the cashier said. Herman thought he saw concern there too, which he didn't want, or need.

"Is your computer workin' yet or not?" He held his head up and set his jaw, looking at her through narrowed eyes.

She nodded. Out of the corner of his eye, Herman spotted a six pack of Duff beer, which he grabbed and dropped on the counter. She eyed him up, then the booze, and raised an eyebrow.

"Good." He passed her two fifties. "I'm gettin' that, too. Keep the change, Shauna," he said to her obvious delight, as he grabbed the smokes, booze and Shopper, and left.

**oOo**

He had an hour before his shop was supposed to open.

Ripping into the plastic encasing the cigarette packet with his teeth, then holding the lid open with his hand, he brought his lips close and selected a cigarette with his mouth. If nothing else, losing his right arm had made him far more dexterous with his mouth — not that, Herman thought with a smirk, he had had many opportunities to demonstrate it. He lit up and carefully slotted the Laramies into a pocket in his jacket. Ignition off, he exited the car.

Shielding his eyes to look skyward, he could see that the overcast clouds had mainly cleared, with small spots of determined sun poking through. The day was nice — it was cool, as he knew it would have been while he'd been sitting in Nick's office. It wasn't unpleasant though, and standing in the weak warmth from the pale sun he almost started to feel better. Leaning back against the car, he stretched, clicking his neck, and rolling his shoulders. The sweat on his skin had mostly dried, and he felt almost normal.

Herman grabbed the beer from inside the car, and set it on the roof of the car. Warm smoke filled his lungs, and he sighed, the welcome taste and smell of the smoke erasing any lingering scent of gasoline clinging to his mind, and the taste of bile on his tongue. He still had the jitters, his hand still shook, but he was away from that place — not just the gas station but also the war — and he was back somewhere safer. Somewhere familiar.

Smokes, beer. He was home.

_You're safe._

Herman resisted the urge to retreat straight back into his shop, and instead got off the car, and locked up the chunky padlock on the gate. Herman then walked the fence line, as he normally did in the mornings before work, checking for any breaches that may have occurred overnight or when he was otherwise absent. There were none, the perimeter secure.

_You'll be okay._

Satisfied that he'd done a thorough job of checking, Herman unlocked the many locks to the back door and returned to the car, sticking the newspaper under his arm and grabbing the beer from the ground. Inside, he dumped the beer on the table, and the newspaper fell to the ground. Herman grumbled, and took the smoke out of his mouth, resting it on the ashtray on the table.

There were times Herman missed having his right arm. It was usually just little things that made him miss it, like being able to bring in all of his groceries in one go, or open his door without needing to put stuff on the ground or in his mouth. And as he bent down and picked up the newspaper and slapped it on the table, he missed his right arm.

Well, he wasn't going to get it back, and he was not getting another prosthetic, that was for sure. Ever since he'd lost his arm, he'd resolved it wouldn't slow him down. He could do things most other people could, sometimes better. Despite having only one arm, he could play a mean game of snooker.

But not dropping shit on the floor would be nice, for once.

Returning to the door, Herman took care to re-lock everything and check twice, as he had with the outside gate. The Duff called to him from the table, but he resisted the temptation to open one.

You probably need to eat first, he told himself, and instead he went to the icebox. Herman stuck his hand in and pulled it out, hoping he'd grabbed something edible, and was pleasantly surprised.

"Shit, I forgot I had pizza," he said to himself, he stuck it in his mouth and winced as the cold hurt his teeth. He opened the microwave door, and shoved it inside, setting the time for two minutes. It was a guess — Herman had no idea how long the packaging advised him to cook it for, he didn't read shit like that — but as far as he knew the Law of Microwaves meant that nearly anything that needed microwaving had to go in for two minutes. Occasionally, five.

"I hope it's cheese," he mumbled. Anything other than that would probably be too much for him to handle after the gas station incident.

Watching the timer tick down, Herman yawned and tried to summon the enthusiasm for another day at work, but it just wouldn't come. After the bullshit at the gas station, he felt exhausted — not that he'd had much energy before setting out in the first place.

Herman considered himself a hard worker. He enjoyed his job, and he considered himself lucky to have a job where he got to use his specialist knowledge set. He was an expert in history, military, weapons, survivalist skills. On the days he saw Bart, he also operated as an advisory in general mischief-making that tended towards the explosive. Herman considered that an essential service to provide to the kid — after all, Bart didn't need to lose his arm, too.

He'd meant to see Otto at some point too, but that'd have to happen later. Likewise with the visit to the Kwik-E mart. He didn't look forward to either, despite having nothing against either proprietor of goods. Socializing was too much to even think about right now. If he was going to freak out like he had earlier, he was better off alone anyway. Less people to scare.

Ten hundred hours, the oven clock told him. Despite it being mid-morning, he felt drained. Herman decided he needed sleep — wandering through the kitchen, Herman took the keys from his pocket, throwing them onto the table. They slid and clinked as they hit the side of the coffee mug, which still sat there from hours earlier.

He'd tried to fight sleep. He'd tried to shut his brain off with alcohol. He'd tried to go to a doctor. He'd taken the pills and the coffee and smokes and nothing seemed to be working. Again, his eyes went to the Duff on the table, and this time he really, _really_ wanted one.

Goddammit, he told himself, just eat first. You're going to collapse if you start on that now.

"Cheap way to get drunk though," he observed, but sighed and decided to leave it.

Herman's head spun as he walked through to his room. Collapsing onto his back on his bed, he stared up at the ceiling, noting the uneven paint and the small cobwebs in the corner. Maybe laying down for a bit, while that pizza cooked, would help him feel less sick and dizzy.

As he lay there, he felt his eyes close. He couldn't keep this up. Willpower was one thing, but his body needed rest. He needed to give in to sleep. Just for a moment.

Eyes closed, he pulled himself up fully onto the bed, not bothering to take his boots off. Forget about spies, and doctors… The risk of memories coming back, the memories of sticky fire and cooking meat…

That was a problem for Herman to deal with later.

He just wanted sleep.

The microwave beeped three times, but he was already out and dead to the world.


	6. Six Megaton Blast

—

_Shall I belong to one man whom I don't love, merely because I have once loved him? No, I do not renounce; I love everyone who pleases me, and give happiness to everyone who loves me._

_Is that ugly? No, it is more beautiful by far._

― Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, 'Venus in Furs'

—

Two blocks from the pet store the sky opened up on Herman with big, heavy water droplets that quickly turned into pelting rain. Swearing and ducking in under the shelter of a storefront, Herman watched as puddles rapidly formed on the sidewalk.

A quick search of his pockets for a bus fare only produced more swearing, and as he stood and leaned against the brick wall of the shop Herman sighed, watching the rain come down in sheets, and briefly considered hitchhiking. That notion was soon discarded — Herman hated hitchhiking, and even though he'd had to resort to it to get to Springfield in the first place he wasn't keen to start doing it again. He figured he'd rather walk the full distance home than have to take his chances with an unknown driver again.

Telling himself to stop being so precious because it was only water, Herman left the shelter of the eaves. Trails of rainwater soon found their way between his clothes and skin, trickling down his face and back, and the wind picked up and made him shiver. The rain roared louder and punched down on his shoulders and head.

Despite Springfield's indeterminable charm, Herman wished that he could have chosen a warmer place to call home.

Passing by another store, he caught sight of his reflection and paused as the advice his boss had given earlier that day came to mind. 'These are the prime years of your life, kid. Get out there and enjoy life. Grab it by the balls.'

Yeah, right. Herman wished he hadn't seen his reflection, but now that he had he reckoned he may as well survey what he saw. He did not look like someone who was at the prime of anything, or who was grabbing anything (except perhaps himself, in the basest of senses) by the balls. The guy in the window looked skinny and miserable, pitiable and pathetic, and the rain made his hair stick to his head and his mismatched eyes look huge and wild.

"Well, hello handsome," Herman said to his reflection, with a sigh. "I bet _you_ have a wild night planned. Girls fawning all over you... Freaky, groovy, drug-fueled orgies... I hear that's where it's at."

A couple walking by gave him shocked looks and hurried past him, and Herman realized that perhaps he shouldn't have said it out loud.

Just as he was about to shout after them, in case they thought to call the cops about the weird kid standing outside the music store talking to himself about orgies and drugs, he was interrupted by the beep of a car. The sound only just managed to rise above the noisy rain, and unsure if he'd imagined it he turned around and saw a Chevy parked up a few feet behind him, two wheels mounted on the footpath.

It was a striking car, aqua with tail-fins, headlights catching the falling rain and illuminating the sidewalk. Approaching it he peered closer, and noted the rust peeking through from between flaking paint and a small peace-sign sticker stuck to one of the hubcaps.

Confused, he stared at it, wondering if the driver was drunk or wanted him to move out of the way. Or, wanted to speak to him.

"Me?" He asked the car, pointing at himself. The horn blared again, this time for longer, and the vehicle flicked its headlights up and back down at him.

"What the hell do you want?" He shouted, approaching the car. As he did, the passenger side window wound down a fraction. Fingers reached through the gap and curled over the top of the window glass and a pair of familiar blue eyes peered out at him.

"Need a ride?" A familiar voice said from inside the car, and he realized with surprise that he knew who she was.

"What?" He said, drawing closer to the car, not quite believing what he was hearing.

Her eyes disappeared as she brought her mouth up to the gap to shout. "A ride! Do you want one?"

"No, I'm fine," he said as he stood in the rain and got wet.

A stubborn son-of-a-bitch, his mother had once called him in one of her friendlier moments. While that woman had definitely had some screws loose herself, it was true in more senses than just one.

There was a click as the door of the car opened, and Herman stepped back. Mona shuffled back over to the driver's side and patted the seat next to her. "Do you really want to walk in this?"

"What about your car? I'll get everything wet," Herman asked.

"It's sweet of you to care," she said, attempting to hide a smile, "but in case you forgot, I have a kid. Believe me, this car has seen worse than a little bit of rainwater." She patted the seat again. "Climb in."

Herman couldn't have really said no to her. Not with that icy rain coming down, and the wind picking up, all while Mona sat there in her car with her door open and her smile wide and inviting, could he? Certainly not coming from her, of all people.

"Come on," she said, beckoning to him as he continued to stand outside the car, at the mercy of the elements. "I don't bite. Hard." She winked at him, and he couldn't quite believe what he was hearing and seeing.

"Ah, well alright..." Before he really knew what he was doing Herman got into the car, and shut the door and winched the window up. Wiping his face with a hand, he looked over at her with his heart thumping. As usual, she looked fantastic. Cute. And she was smiling at him, too, and as cold as it was outside he felt his face become warm.

"Where are you going to?"

"Uh, other side of town. Thank you," he added.

"Where exactly?" Mona inquired.

"East Oak Street."

The smallest frown crossed her face and was gone in an instant, but Herman knew where it had come from. She quickly changed the subject.

"Okay, well… You want a towel? Hang on, I think I have one on the parcel shelf..." Without waiting for a reply, Mona climbed up onto her knees in the driver's seat and through a series of impressive bodily contortions she reached back over the bench seat for the promised towel.

Herman watched her from the passenger seat. As she leaned over and stretched, he couldn't help noticing how the movement made the hem of her mini-dress slide up a little, exposing the band at the very top of her pantyhose. If it hitched up much more he reckoned he'd almost be able to see to Christmas, but he wasn't complaining at all, after all, he had always had thought Mona had a fine body…

He cursed inwardly. This really wasn't the right time for... that. Sticking his hands in the pockets of his wet jacket he pulled the fabric across himself.

"Ahah! Here you go," she said, and as she pulled herself back into the driver's seat her butt wiggled a little. It only added fuel to the fire, but Mona didn't seem to realize the state he was in, and she handed the towel to him with a friendly smile.

"Thank you," he said, taking the towel from her with one hand while the other stayed in his jacket pocket.

"You're welcome." Her eyes took in the closed-up, awkward way he was sitting and how he clutched the jacket around himself, as she knelt next to him. "Are you cold? I think I have a blanket back there—"

"No, no, please don't trouble..." He started, but she'd already reached into the back seat again, and by God if her skirt didn't hitch up a little more... "Okay," he croaked.

"Sorry. I can't seem to find it," she said from the back seat.

"Maybe it's further back. On that parcel shelf," he suggested helpfully.

"We must have it at home. I can't see it anywhere." She sighed and pulled herself back through to the front cab, tapping her fingers on the back of her chair.

"What a shame," he said, and Herman's eyes lingered on her thighs for a fraction of a second longer than they really should have. Tugging downward on her hem, she cleared her throat, and it snapped him out of whatever trance he'd been in. His eyes jumped up to her face, and he felt horrified as it occurred to him...

_She just caught you ogling her._

"Whoops, sorry about that. I forget this dress does that sometimes." A little embarrassed laugh escaped her, and she busied herself with getting back into the driver's seat. "Just as well I'm wearing pantyhose, huh?"

"Hah, yeah, just as well..." Herman felt like slamming his head into the window, but decided that wouldn't make things any better. "I hardly noticed," he tacked on, hoping it would help the situation somehow, but how could it? Of course he'd noticed, and he _knew_ she'd noticed him noticing, too.

"Sure." Was that a smirk playing around her lips?

_She saw you openly leering at her._

Mortified, he resolved to keep his eyes fixed on the passenger window, nowhere near Mona, and rubbed at his face and neck roughly with the towel as if it could scrub away all the awkwardness and embarrassment he felt. The compulsion to just open up the car door and start walking home again was almost too much to bear, but he stayed seated.

Neither spoke as Mona indicated out, the long car rocking as it lumbered off the sidewalk and back onto the road, and with a three-point-turn she drove back in the direction she'd come from. The cab was silent, save for the window wipers squeaking rhythmically like a tortured metronome.

The more he looked around the car, the more he realized that it had seen better days. It would have once been a beast of yesteryear, someone's (likely Abe's) pride and joy, but now there were cobwebs in unused spaces and spots in the leather upholstery that had worn thin.

"Just fling the towel back there when you're done," Mona said, breaking the silence between them. She didn't sound angry — if anything, she sounded amused.

Herman said nothing and bundled up the towel, and he turned, reaching back to place it behind the bench seat. The momentary gesture brought him close enough to Mona to get a faint whiff of patchouli.

_She'll think you're a pervert. Do you really want to make her even more nervous? You pervert._

He drew away from her, and out of nervous habit his hand went to the back of his neck.

"Sand?" He asked, frowning and looking at his hand, running his thumb along his fingertips.

"Oh! Sorry, that must have been our beach towel..."

"No, it's alright." He hoped he hadn't sounded ungracious. "I mean, thank you. For the towel."

She raised an eyebrow.

"You're covered in sand," she said. "But, I guess you're welcome."

He wiped his face with his hands, finding more sand, and when he dared to hazard a glance back at her she was grinning.

She sure had an infectious smile.

"Why were you walking?" She asked. "East Oak Street is on the other side of Springfield."

"I thought I had change for the bus..." He trailed off. "It's just rain. I don't really care much about having to walk in it. I ain't gonna melt."

"Well, I'm glad I spotted you. It's way too far away to walk in weather like this, you could get sick. Besides, don't you ever get worried about walking through that neighborhood?" That little frown from earlier that had flitted across her face returned, but it stayed a bit longer this time.

Herman shook his head. "Not really. Once you seen one flasher, you kinda seen 'em all. After around the fourth one they lose most of their shock value… Although it's so cold I reckon they're probably carrying Polaroids instead today. It's a bit icy," he added.

It was a risque for him to say, especially considering his behavior, but it got a sneaky giggle out of her. "I'm sure that's not the reason you live there, though."

"Well I mean, the flashers have their charm, but no, it's mainly because of money," he replied. "Cheapest place to live that ain't under a bridge."

She nodded. "Fair enough."

"I hope it ain't too far out of your way to carry me there," he said, and it was a stupid thing to say, because of course it was out of her way. There was no sound reason for a respectable, married woman like Mona to go anywhere near Skid Row — a district which largely contained only the most unsavory businesses and people of Springfield.

She stopped at a set of traffic lights. "I'm not on my way to anywhere in particular at the moment. Just driving around, you know, to clear my head. So it's good that I ran into you." Her tone carried a forced nonchalance, and this time when smiled it didn't reach her eyes. "This gives me something to do."

"Right." The car windows had started steaming up, so he wound the window down a fraction again. "Well, thank you for carryin' me down town, I do appreciate it." He rubbed at the window with a wet sleeve to clear it.

"No, it's my pleasure."

Those words settled in his brain and wouldn't budge. Her pleasure. He remembered the top of her thighs and that wiggle and he pressed his lips together and he shuffled uncomfortably in his seat. Her pleasure. What would that…

_For God's sake, she's doing you a favor. The very least you can do is try not to go from six-to-fucking-midnight in her car._

Mona gave him a quick glance before returning her eyes to the road, feeling an unwanted blush cross his face as he stared out of the window.

"You alright?" She asked.

"Fine."

The lights went green and the car started up again, and turned a corner. "You know, I've been going to that pet store for years, but I don't think I've ever told you my name. I'm Mona."

He already knew her name, and he had for months, but there was absolutely no way he was going to tell her that. "Herman, " he said, still staring out the window.

"Herman." She repeated, and upon hearing her utter his name he looked over at her and a tiny smile was sitting at the corners of her lips. He really liked the way his name sounded coming out of her mouth in that soft, clear voice of hers.

_Maybe too much._ He pulled the jacket around him a bit tighter. _What the hell is wrong with you?_

"You know, every time I've gone into that store for dog food for Bongo I've been calling you Tex in my head," Mona said.

"Tex?" He'd been working so hard to squash the distinctive accent of his native state ever since he left it but in spite of that, he felt flattered he'd earned a nickname from her, even one so generic. Obviously, she thought often enough about him that he warranted one. "It's that obvious?" He asked, with a grimace.

"Only a little." That smile played around her lips a little more. "And no-one around here says 'carry down-town'."

Herman sighed. "Noted. Guess I still have a few things to work on, huh?"

"What? No, don't change it! I like the way you talk," Mona said emphatically. "I reckon you could make even a shopping list sound good."

"Well, if you've got one laying about I could give it a shot," Herman said with a grin.

"I'm afraid I don't have one on me. It's probably safer you don't, to be honest..."

"Why's that?"

She giggled, but didn't say anything further. What was happening? He couldn't quite believe she was flirting with him…

_But if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck..._

They fell into silence again, and needing some distraction from the thoughts in his head Herman leaned over and turned the radio on.

"Not the station I was expecting, Mona," he said, realizing it was a news station.

She glowered. "Abe changes it back to this one every time he gets in the car. Says he hates that 'hippy-communist music they play nowadays'. Honestly, what kind of person wants to hear about war all the time?"

Unfortunately for Mona, they were playing Nixon's address that had been televised the night before. Herman hadn't seen the address himself — he didn't own a TV and hadn't been anywhere that had one — but the customers at the shop that day hadn't been able to talk about anything else.

Herman turned the volume up slightly.

_"So tonight, to you, the great silent majority of my fellow Americans, I ask for your support. I pledged in my campaign for the Presidency to end the war in a way that we could win the peace. I have initiated a plan of action which will enable me to keep that pledge. The more support I can have from the American people, the sooner that pledge can be redeemed. For the more divided we are at home, the less likely the enemy is to negotiate in Paris._

_"Let us be united for peace. Let us also be united against defeat. Because let us understand: North Vietnam cannot defeat or humiliate the United States. Only Americans—"_

"Scum." With a forceful twist of the dial Mona turned the radio off. Herman looked over at her — she was fuming, her lips pressed together tight and her jaw set. The leather of the steering wheel squeaked and he saw her knuckles whiten as she gripped it. "I still can't believe it. I can't believe that he's still sending young men off to die. Still! The draft is a criminal enterprise, it only serves the wealthy, the warmongers, the politicians… the people who started it! Don't even get me started on Project 100,000..." Her tone was bracing, and her face clouded over with righteous anger. "Herman, how old are you?"

"Twenty."

"And you're conscripted?"

Herman nodded. "Yes, I am—"

"What's going to happen if you get a draft card? Or if your number comes up in December for the draft lottery?" There was an edge to her voice he hadn't heard before.

"I — I'm not sure..." Herman had always tried very hard not to think about the possibility of being drafted. "But I suppose I'd have to go if they called me up for service and I passed the board. Far as I can tell there ain't much choice in the matter—"

"There are ways of getting out of having to serve."

Herman looked over at her, and her eyes were still fixed on the road, and she still had that strange expression on her face.

"You could make a break for Canada," she continued. "You... You could lie and tell them you're gay." Mona frowned a little. "Unless you are, in which case—"

"No, I ain't," he said, which as far as anyone was concerned was close enough.

"... Well, you could pretend you were, so the army won't take you... There are psychologists, doctors who can help—" She stopped herself abruptly. "Lots of people are doing it, they're refusing to fight, and they have every right to! Nixon shouldn't be forcing our young men to fight in this war we've already lost."

"People get locked up for... That," Herman said carefully. He'd already known for a long time that Mona was staunchly anti-war, even before he saw that little peace sticker on her Chevy's hub cap, and so he shouldn't have been so surprised that she was suggesting that he dodge the draft. But Mona had always seemed to be such an upstanding, law abiding citizen of Springfield — sure, he figured she had a rebellious streak but it shocked him that right now she was telling him to break the law.

"It's only illegal if you get caught. You're smart," she added, casting a quick sideways glance at him, "and if you went about it the right way, with the right kind of help, I don't think they'd catch you. They don't catch lots of people."

"Okay." But the words of his Opa, from years ago rang in his ears. 'This country does so much for you, for us. If your country says it needs you, _enkel_ — you go. It's your duty as an American citizen to fight for your country. To protect this country that's looked after you since the day you were born, by doing what it tells you to do, when it tells you to do it.'

Herman deeply, intrinsically resented being told what to do. The freedom to make decisions, even the wrong ones, was a right he valued very highly. If he decided to fight for his country of his own volition, then that was fine, but being told he needed to? With no say in the matter? It made him balk.

His Opa was right, this country had looked after him — arguably more than his own parents had. What kind of man would he be if he just ran from the draft and refused to fight? Mona was right too though, the war was lost, but his country still needed him.

He couldn't forget that she was trying to tell him what to do too, after all.

Herman decided right now it was best to stay silent.

The leather of the driving wheel squeaked as she released her grip and stretched her fingers out, in an attempt to relax herself. "Sorry. I didn't mean to lecture you. Abe hates it when I bring up the war, he says 'the only good commie is one who's dead.'"

Yes, that was a sentiment he'd heard Abe express loudly many times at the tavern, to the general consensus and jingoistic support of most of his drinking buddies and a few other patrons.

"You know, I've given up talking to him about Vietnam." Softer now, Mona's voice wavered, and she added, "I've given up talking to him altogether, you know."

Herman watched as Mona wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, saw the fight to contain her emotions, and felt sorry for her but struggled with what to do to help.

"Are you okay?"

"Not really." She sniffed, and sat up straight, expression steeling over. "But I'll manage. I have to. No-one else is going to fight my battles for me. And I need to be strong for Homer."

"Mona..." He longed to give her some kind of reassuring advice, only he didn't know what he could possibly say to help, and that made him feel useless. "You're a good mother."

"Maybe, but I'm stuck in a loveless marriage with a man who doesn't respect me or listen to me. The only time we communicate is when we argue."

"That's no way to live," he murmured, adding a daring, "you deserve more."

She seemed to not hear him, stuck in her own thoughts. It became clear to Herman that she didn't have many people to talk about this to. Perhaps she didn't have _anyone_. "And I worry that when we argue Homer thinks it's because of him... Abe thinks I'm too soft on Homer, but he's a sensitive boy, he needs to blossom and be nurtured. Not trod on and have his creativity stifled. And I could _not_ live with myself if he ever got sent overseas to die in that war and I did nothing."

Herman wasn't sure exactly what she meant by that last part, but decided not to inquire. "Is there anything I can do to help?" He asked, as she rubbed at her eyes with the back of her hand.

"You're already doing enough by listening. That's more than Abe does." Sitting at another set of lights, she looked at her hand, and then up at her rear view mirror, and let out an exasperated sigh. "My mascara's smudged," she said with annoyance. "I look like a damn raccoon." She ran a finger along the bottom of her eyes in an attempt to remove the dark makeup, managing to smudge it more. She looked so deeply exhausted, like she had on they day they'd first met. Maybe, he thought, her black dog was running loose again.

"I… You still… You always look good to me, Mona."

It made her look over at him in surprise. Herman's heart pounded in his chest and he looked out his window again, but not before he spotted a smile return to her face.

**oOo**

The place was a mess. His eye caught sight of a pile of unfolded clothes dumped on the floor of the lounge, and he swiftly made his way over to them and shoved them further out of sight with his foot. Deciding that wasn't enough, he threw one of the blankets from the couch over them for good measure.

Mona seemed not to notice the mess or his awkwardness — she looked around at the plants and old rugs that he'd got from a second hand store for a couple of dollars, at the old blankets on the couches, and her eyes settled on the pile of random electronic junk in the corner. Far from looking disgusted or shocked at the state of his home, she seemed intrigued.

There was no way he could have known this morning that Mona, of all people, was going to give him a lift home. And he absolutely couldn't have predicted that he would have the courage to ask her in for coffee, or that for some bizarre reason she'd say yes.

Gravitating to the bookshelf, Mona walked over to it and picked a book up. "You play piano?"

"I'd like to learn." He sat on one of the two mismatching dining chairs he owned and unlaced his shoes, watching her. "Buying how-to books is cheaper'n getting lessons. I have nothing to play on though, but there's this out of tune piano down at the community hall..." He trailed off, feeling self-conscious.

"You like banned books," she observed, plucking another book from the shelf. She showed him the cover — Fahrenheit 451.

"I do," he said with a grin. "I don't believe in censorship. Freedom of speech is important."

"A man after my own heart. You know, I've wanted to read this book for a long time."

"You can borrow it, I don't mind." He watched as she nodded and her eyes stayed glued to the book. Hell, she could keep it if she really wanted to — anything at all that she did was fine with him.

"There's a great bookstore down the road that sells a range of..." Herman stopped, realizing she wasn't really listening. He watched as she took a seat on the couch with his book, those elegant hands — too good for the domestic chores she was no doubt expected to complete at home — holding his favorite book. Watched as she licked a finger and turned the page.

Watched her absently bite her lip a little in concentration as she read…

"I'm going to get changed, I'll be back. Fix yourself coffee if you like. There's a turntable in the corner, over there." Without waiting for a reply he retreated to the bathroom and grabbed a towel, heading straight for the bedroom with his heart thumping, and closed the door after him.

Back to the door, he took a deep breath in, in an attempt to calm himself. Peeling the wet clothes off himself layer by layer and discarding them on the floor in a pile, he tried not to think too much about the woman in his apartment, a woman who up until now had always seemed a little too far out of reach for him.

_Up until now? No, no. She still is too far out of reach. She always will be. She's married, for God's sake._

He scrubbed at his face and hair with the towel, noting a small amount of sand left in the terry loops of the fabric.

With a grin, he thought back to Mona reaching to the back seat for the towel for him, and it made his stomach flip. That needy and heavy feeling in his crotch returned, but nothing could be done about it now though, not with her only a few feet away from the door he was standing behind. Meeting her eye was difficult enough right now with the thoughts going through his head, but facing her after…? No. He could wait.

Reckoning a heavy pair of jeans could only help to hide things, he grabbed a pair and threw them on along with a woolen sweater. It wasn't flattering and looking in his mirror he realized he looked like a fisherman, but it was a small price to pay to retain his dignity and some semblance of being a gentleman. Opening the bedroom door a fraction, and sliding through the gap (lest Mona see how messy his room was, too), Herman closed the door again.

From the kitchen came the quiet tapping of ceramic by a metal teaspoon, and the smell of coffee, and from the lounge the sound of one of his records. Herman quietly pulled up a seat at the table and watched her in the kitchen.

He could only partially see her from where she was, dancing a little in the kitchen and hear her singing along quietly to the current track. She didn't have a bad voice at all, but he wished that she would sing a little louder. He grinned as she started imitating the guitar.

"Crimson and Clover, huh?" He said and she jumped a little, spinning around to look at him with a blush.

"Uh, yeah." Mona picked up a mug of coffee and walked back through from the kitchen, leaning against the wall. "It was already in the player, so I hope you don't mind listening to it again… I like Tommy James and the Shondells, and I haven't had a chance to listen to many songs from this record. Only the ones that get radio play."

"You're lucky, I only just got it."

"Where from?" She asked, making her way over to the table

"Record shop, down the road." Herman refrained from mentioning that he hadn't paid for it.

Herman reached up for the coffee mug, and their fingers brushed together briefly as she passed it to him. "Okay. Well, I had to throw out your milk, so I guess we're having black coffee," she told him. "I hope you don't mind. I don't."

"Sorry," he said, setting the mug down. "Bet you think I'm a mess."

"No." She returned to the kitchen for her own coffee mug, and when she reappeared she shook her head at him. "No, Herman. You're not a mess. This whole world around us is a mess, not you. You're just a normal twenty-year-old guy." Mona pulled out the other chair and took a seat. She rested her elbows on the tabletop, and pulled the net curtain away from the window to look outside.

It wasn't much of a view, especially considering the weather. Everything outside was gray. Gray skies, gray buildings, gray rain. Monochromatic. Herman looked at Mona sitting in her pink sleeveless dress and sunny disposition, and set against such a bleak background she was a beacon of brightness and color in an otherwise dull world. A ray of sunshine.

"What awful weather," she said to him, pulling away from the window. "I'm glad I stopped for you, you looked exactly like how I felt... Hey, I was meaning to ask, what's that over there?" she asked, pointing at the corner of the room where a small pile of black wires, valves and small screwdrivers sat on the floor.

"That mess? Set of speakers. Someone left 'em on the side of the road. I was thinking of fixing 'em up, hooking 'em up to that turntable if I can… Just waiting on someone to dump more of 'em out roadside. The valves are blown and I don't wanna spend that much money on it."

"Wow." She sounded — and looked — impressed. "It's a hobby?"

"Yes."

"You don't want to go to college?"

"If I had the money to? Sure."

"What would you study?" It sounded like she was genuinely interested, and as she looked at him with eager eyes nervousness kicked in.

"I'm not sure. It's never been an option."

"Well, I noticed a lot of books about history over there." She poked her thumb out towards the bookshelf. "What about that?"

"… I don't know if I'd want to study it."

Mona looked confused. "Why do you have all of those books then?"

"It's just an interest of mine. I... Like trying to see patterns from history." Noticing Mona had started to look even more confused, Herman felt even more self-conscious and continued. "Uh… I reckon you can see similar stuff happening again and again…" He shrugged. "Or maybe I'm just a bit crazy."

Mona dipped her finger in her coffee, testing the temperature, and stuck it in her mouth. Herman shivered. "No, I don't think you are. I think you're onto something there, Herman. Do you think maybe if we stopped coming up with new ways to kill each other, then maybe there would be a better shot at peace without war?"

"Maybe."

"Maybe?"

"Well, it ain't that simple. If someone threatens you, I do believe you should be able to defend yourself. I..." Herman paused. "In my experience, people aren't naturally pacifists. It just ain't possible — I mean, if someone did you wrong, would you just sit back and accept it?" Herman shook his head. "No. Radical action is what people pay attention to. Violence lies at the heart of every person. So does peace. You can't have one without the other though."

She said nothing, but she nodded slowly and they held each other's gaze.

"Do you have a girlfriend, Herman?" The question was unexpected, and it caught him off guard.

"Uh, no, I'm — I'm not seeing anyone," he stammered.

She frowned. "I find that hard to believe—"

"Truly, Mona, there's no-one."

"Well, why not?" She moved her chair closer to him. "You seem a catch. A young, good looking guy like you should be with _someone.._. There really isn't anyone?"

Good looking? Herman wasn't sure if he'd heard her right. He considered himself a few things — and attractive was not one of them.

"Well…" Go on, man, say it. Be brave for once. "Out of all the ladies out there, there's only one woman I'm interested in, and… she's, uh, taken. Her man doesn't deserve a woman like her." Mona's eyes were drilling into him, and he felt his face burn as his eyes traced the patterns in the net curtain. "You know what? It's a silly fancy, I'll get over it. I have to, there's nothing either one of us can do about it, it's just the fact of the matter. She's unavailable."

"Why do you like her so much?" Mona leaned in closer to him.

His nerves got the better of him, and he pushed his chair away a little, crossing an ankle over his knee, grabbing the unfinished coffee.

Distance. He needed distance.

Herman cleared his throat and continued, stomach swirling like the coffee inside the mug he held. "Uh. Well, I haven't met anyone like her before. She's sweet, caring, all that nice stuff, but she's strong and she wants to make the world a better place, and you know what? I think she can. I want to learn more about her but I'm afraid to, because I don't need more of a reason to be stuck on her."

After that, neither of them spoke for a while. The record had finished playing, and the sudden silence seemed oppressive, as if it was trying to force either one of them to say something. He kept his gaze fixed on the coffee, fingernails tapping on the side of the mug rhythmically, in an attempt to ease the tension. She kept her gaze on him.

The chair scraped on the ground again as she moved in closer, again.

"Those are all very sweet things. Maybe you should tell her that you feel that way."

He looked up at her, and her eyes were warm and his heart jumped.

"I just have."

Herman had no idea how he'd even managed to say it, because his throat felt choked up and he must be shaking, and he felt warm and itchy and why the hell had he decided to wear a woolen jumper without anything underneath it? He stole a glance at her, expecting the worst.

He'd half expected for her to just pretend she had no idea what he was talking about, and excuse herself and leave. Or, maybe for her to be shocked, and jump from her chair and leave the room wordlessly. Maybe even slapping him across the face on her way out, shouting at him that she wasn't that kind of girl. Or, at the very least, for her to tell him that she was very flattered but that she was a married woman, and there was no way that she could possibly be with him.

This was a moment he'd imagined for a long time, and there were so many scenarios that had run through his head that when none of them happened, he didn't know what to do.

Mona reached out and wrapped her hands around his, taking the mug from him and turning and placing it on the table beside them. One of her hands grasped his ankle, firmly pulling it away from his knee and guiding it to the floor. When her hands returned, it was to his waist and his damp hair, and as he watched her he could hardly breathe, a part of him wondering if he was asleep and this was a part of a really great dream. But the shifting weight on his lap as she straddled him and leaned in, that was definitely real, and so was the involuntary whimper he let slip — and her warm breath in his ear that sent goosebumps up his spine, that felt real too.

"In that case, I'd better give you a ride tomorrow too, Herman."

Yes, she'd really said that.

He tried to say something back in response, probably something stupid like 'what' or 'are you sure?' when she was making it very obvious that she certainly was, but his breath hitched and he stared back into eyes framed with smudged mascara.

One of them, he couldn't recall who but suspected it was her, made the first move and kissed the other, and it was reciprocated. His hands, which until that moment had been desperately clutching the chair he sat on like it was going to throw him to the ground like a pinto, relaxed and found their way to the back of her dress. Breathing hard, and with shaking hands, he fumbled with the buttons there, but eventually she shifted his hands away and grinned down at him, completing the task herself. She pulled that pink sleeveless dress over her head and flung it across the room with a giggle.

Then she stood — drew him up with her — and he pressed up against her, pushing her against the table, and kicking the mismatching chairs over and out of the way. Herman's coffee mug tipped over and fell off the table and he heard the handle break off, but neither of them paid attention to it.

Partially disrobed and with her hair messy from the abrupt removal of her dress, Mona sat perched on the edge of the table in her pantyhose and underwear, and by God he hadn't ever seen anything quite like her, before or since.

Her hand patted the table she sat on. "How strong is this table, do you think?" She asked coyly, eliciting only a mute stare from him as he stood barefoot in the coffee, and with a sly grin she continued.

"Let's find out."


	7. Because Somebody Talked

—

_The natural role of the twentieth-century man is anxiety._

— Norman Mailer, 'The Naked and the Dead'

—

A low sigh left Herman as he rested his head back, on the cold edge of the tub. Allowing his head to drop from the lip of the bathtub, he sank down deeper. The warm bathwater lapped at the exposed skin on his neck, creating a slight burning sensation. With his eyelids feeling heavy, he let his eyes close. He couldn't help the sleepy smile that crossed his face at the memory of the dream.

And God, what a dream! Much better than the scrambled memories of the war that usually took the place of dreams. When he'd woken, the image of Mona — sitting on his table like some exquisite delicacy, with her warm come-hither eyes, her sly smile, that ass, those lips — still remained in his head. Half asleep, his hand had slid inside his pants and between his underwear and his skin. It would have been a shame, he had told himself, to let it go to waste, and it wasn't long before he'd been reliving the pleasures of that moment, even if they were by his own hand.

Laying in the bath, Herman's grin grew. Sleeping, jerking off, then having a bubble bath. It felt indulgent and hedonistic, more than anything else he'd done in recent months, and it felt good.

There was a cruel irony to the fact that Herman had to force himself into relaxation. Even then, no verbena and chamomile bubble bath could ever really unwind the part of him that always stayed alert and on-guard.

He turned his head and opened his eyes a crack, and his gaze was drawn to the black Sig Sauer sitting on the chair beside him, on top of his towel on a nearby chair. His eyes traced the lines of the gun, as he rehearsed in his mind the internal parts that made it function. It was far from the ugliest handgun he owned — that dubious honor went to the Glock sitting in the kitchen drawer — but it didn't look as nice as his Ruger.

With his head still fuzzy from sleep and sex, Herman had originally grabbed the small six-shooter from his bedside table in preparation for his bath, but then he'd stopped himself. The SP101 didn't handle steam well, with more parts blued than fully protected against corrosion, and in winter the bathroom turned into a steam room at the slightest inclusion of heat and water. Additionally, fifteen rounds from a comparably easy-to-reload semi-automatic pistol would always win out over six from a revolver.

And so, the Sig — not an ugly gun, by a long shot, but certainly without the appeal of a revolver — made more sense, had won out over the Ruger, and had been selected to accompany Herman into the bathroom.

Herman sat up and reached over the lip of the tub, grabbing the open can of Duff that he had strategically placed within arm's reach. His hair stuck to his neck as he sat up in the tub, and a draft from somewhere came in to chill his skin. Having retrieved the Duff from the floor, he didn't hesitate to sink back into the welcoming warmth of the bathwater.

The day had darkened and turned cold, and when Herman had looked outside the sun from earlier had disappeared, swallowed up by stormy clouds. Some shit weather was on it's way in, for sure.

One of the little yellow ducks he shared his bathtub with floated across his stomach.

"Oh hey there General George S. Quackin'," he said with a grin.

It'd be a cold day in Hell before Herman would ever admit that he took even the occasional bubble bath with yellow rubber duckies. It wasn't in keeping with his reputation as a man who lived and breathed military history and strategy, who had (on more than one occasion) bribed the Springfield police in order to keep himself out of jail, and who was an experienced survivalist, weapons expert and somewhat-decent timber sportsman. Even his weakness for amateur film and his grudging love of community theater was more widely known than his habit for bubble baths with his yellow rubber duckies.

Herman had a lot of secrets, and the rubber duckies were one of the more benign ones. As a man with many secrets, it was a boon that no-one seemed to ever be terribly interested in Herman as a person. For the most part, people avoided him, and he was more than fine with that.

"You boys," Herman said with a smile, as he raised his Duff to the duck floating by his elbow, and nodded at its brethren by his feet, "you boys are alright. _Prost_." He brought the beer up to his lips and took a draught.

The ducks didn't say anything in response — thankfully. Herman leaned over the side of the tub, and carefully set the beer back down on the floor.

"Ah." He'd fallen asleep before he'd got to eat the pizza or even retrieve it from the microwave, and when the afterglow of orgasm had passed his stomach had grumbled, reminding him of the food he hadn't eaten. Herman had decided to reheat it and stick it on a plate and set it next to the bath, because why the hell not? He was hungry, and it was his house, and if he wanted to eat pizza in the bath, then he was fucking going to eat pizza in the bath.

He took another bite out of the pizza — rubbery and limp from being reheated twice — and stuck it back on the plate. It occurred to him that he really hadn't eaten properly in quite a while. Maybe he needed to visit Apu and buy some real food. Perhaps he'd even treat himself to something that had once grown on a tree or out of the ground, instead of just living off microwavable meals and MRE's.

_Oh, and Otto_. _You definitely need to visit him_. Herman frowned. He really needed more pills. Not a lot, just… Some.

Herman revised that — didn't really _need_ need those pills, he reminded himself. They were just a tool, in case he needed to stay awake again.

After all, he reminded himself, just because he was enjoying himself now, that didn't mean that the people who were watching him were taking a break. He'd slept, and he felt better now, better equipped for productivity. After the pizza and the beer and the duckies, he needed to sort some shit out.

Herman ran through the mental checklist: check that trap outside again, check the perimeters, check the locks. Sort out those dishes, finally, maybe. Go see Apu. Then Otto. Do some cleaning, since it was hard to tell if anything had been misplaced or moved in his absence if his stuff was everywhere to start with.

He'd even started to doubt that there really were people watching him.

_Maybe that's what they want you to think…_

"Ah, fuck off." It was some time between three and four in the afternoon, and Herman was having a day off from everything. The suspicion that he was being monitored lingered however, hindering his attempts to relax, and as he chewed on the pizza in his mouth his expression darkened and his good mood faded.

_Subliminal messages. Priming. Thought implantation. _

_Don't be so sure your mind is yours._

Shaking his head, Herman picked up the beer again, and took another sip to wash down the pizza, pushing one of the rubber ducks around at the end of the tub with his big toe. He could at least take things easy for a while before jumping back in. Setting the beer down on the floor by the bath, he sank back down into the tub, picking up the rubber duck at his side.

"How're things goin', General?" He asked, and he squeezed the little duck.

_Squeak squeak._

"No need to be so talkative," he said with a chuckle, as he turned the duck in his hand, surveying it. It was an old duck, and someone would have taken huge care to paint the features on by hand a long time ago. Most of the paint from one of the eyes was gone, and some from the bill, but that was okay. It gave him character.

"You've been through the wars little friend, just like me." He set the duck down gently on the water, among the rapidly disappearing bubbles. Herman put his lips together and blew a path through the bubbles for him.

"You know, my Oma bought me one of you guys for one of my birthdays. I loved that fuckin' duck, took it everywhere, but I have no idea what happened to 'im. He just disappeared one day. I was beside myself, because he reminded me of Oma… She used to say that if I had a problem, and I felt lonely, to talk about it with the duck just like at the park, and when it was gone..." He shook his head. "Would have better if she'd just taken me out of that hell-hole. I never knew why she and Opa didn't. Maybe they couldn't."

The sudden need for alcohol to help deal with the memories of his grandparents was fierce, and so Herman stuck his hand over the side of the tub and blindly groped for the can of Duff that he was working on. Locating it, he brought the can to his lips, and relished in the feeling of the cool beer going down his throat as he lay in the warm bathwater. Balm for the mind, he thought with a grin. Herman's knees were cold as they stuck up above the surface of the water, and it made him wonder why every bath tub he'd ever been in had been too short for him.

"I have a problem." Herman said to the duck next to him, as he held his can of Duff. "And it's not about the size of my bath tub."

Shaking the can and realizing it was empty, Herman tossed it past the duck, down the other end of the tub, where it stayed with the other ducks and the previous two cans he'd finished. Herman lay back further in the tub, giving up on keeping his knees warm.

"I keep rememberin' stuff I shouldn't," he continued, keeping eye contact with the duck. "It comes up when I sleep, and then I remember it when I'm awake, and that's a problem. I don't want to remember it when I'm awake." He could feel his hair getting wet and heavy from the water in the tub, and hear the bubbles popping in his ears.

He closed his eyes, and Mona entered his mind again. That first time together, that had really been something. She'd sat on the edge of his table and she'd directed him to roll down her pantyhose. Herman's heart still jumped when he thought about the way she'd looked down at him on the floor as he completed the task, with interest and an eyebrow cocked in amusement, while she'd removed her bra.

There was no doubt that Mona had recognized his inexperience, she must have seen it from the awkward way he tried to please her, and how his reluctance to hurt or displease her in any way battled against his very obvious desire to fuck her stupid. Perhaps that was why she was so forgiving when he came too early.

When Herman had withdrawn from her, with his face flushed from embarrassment and exertion, she had told him 'I am never angry at anything that is natural' before smiling sweetly at him and pushing his head down. He took the hint. The smell and taste of her and him mixed in together was intoxicating, and at the time he'd felt so wicked (and a little confused) because he'd liked it so much that he got hard again, but he received no judgment from her, although he felt that he really should have. After a few minutes, she'd grabbed his hand, wordlessly guiding him to where she needed him to go. Mona certainly knew what she wanted.

She'd spent a lot of time guiding him back in those days, for which he'd been grateful ever since.

"I miss her."

In the small bathroom, amongst the company of the silent ducks and the spiders up in the ceiling somewhere, his words hung in the steamy air. There was no way he could escape them, and he tensed.

'_I miss her.' What is that shit? You don't need anyone. You're not a weakling. You don't need to miss anything or anyone, you're fine on your own._

_Grow up, Herman._

His jaw felt tight, and the taste of his spit had changed, and he sniffed. The strange feeling in his chest, that was just from the steam settling in his lungs, nothing else. And he must have rubbed his face and got some of the water from the bubble bath in his eyes, because his eyes stung now. He blinked to clear them.

They were lies, and as much as Herman tried to convince himself otherwise he knew that they were hollow excuses for how he felt.

_Maybe you are a weakling. I mean, look at you!_

Herman pushed himself up to sitting, and leaned over and grabbed a new Duff from the floor beside the bath. Holding the can against his stomach, he cracked it open with one hand. It fizzed over, and a small amount of froth spilled into the bathtub, joining the bubbles.

The loss of such a paltry amount of alcohol shouldn't have bothered him as much as it did, but he still snarled and swore, and an unreasonable amount of anger swelled up inside him. "Did someone fucking shake these or something?" He grumbled, and lay back in the bath, clutching the can in his hand and holding it just above the level of the bathwater to stop it getting warm. Bringing the can to his mouth, he gulped down a mouthful of Duff, and glared at the can held in his hand.

"I mean," he said, less to the duck than to himself, "why the fuck do I even care? It's not like I've heard from her in years. She's probably off doing her own thing. Probably with… some other guy..."

That thought had been in his head for years, and he'd often wondered what kind of man Mona could be with right now. Would he be like Abe — stubborn, proud, a man with honor? Or one like Herman — just as stubborn, but broken, with no honor. Maybe the man she was with was completely different again to the both of them. Maybe he was a man who actually had something to give her.

Or, maybe she wasn't with anyone, but she'd rather be alone than be with him.

_That must be it. You know she wants nothing to do with you. You know that. And now, she's forgotten about you — she forgot about you long ago — and you haven't let her go._

_God, that's pathetic. You're pathetic._

_You worthless— _

"Fuck!" Herman hurled the almost-full can as hard as he could at the wall opposite him. It hit with a loud bang, and beer exploded out of it and splattered across the wall and floor. The can fell into the bath with a splash.

Herman brought his knees up to his chest, weaving his fingers through his hair.

"Fuck, fuck, fuck!"

The opening of the floodgates that held back those emotions and thoughts was sudden and violent, but not unprecedented. It happened sometimes to Herman, that he was fine one moment, and the next he was sliding down that slippery slope again, that got steeper and steeper. Each time his descent to the bottom of it seemed to happen faster.

_Of course she moved on. Why wouldn't she?_

_You weren't enough for her. There was no way you ever could be. She deserves someone better._

_Mona wants nothing to do with you. Can you blame her?_

They weren't new thoughts, but they'd been dormant long enough that when they came to the surface again it hurt, and he believed they all were true.

Sometimes, it felt to him as if when he pulled himself back together again he wasn't doing it right, like he was using the wrong kind of glue to stick parts of himself back together again without really knowing what he was doing and only why. Even if he didn't fall apart right away the pieces wouldn't ever be lined up properly, and some might even be missing, like a vase that had been smashed too many times.

The disturbing thought that he was eventually and slowly falling apart — and that with every attempt to piece things back together he was becoming something unrecognizable, something that was weaker and sub-par to his former self — settled in his mind.

_You're broken, faulty. Weak. Hateful. No wonder Mona doesn't want anything to do with you. _

_In fact, forget Mona, because she's long gone now, and she isn't coming back._

_You have no-one._

_You're alone. And always will be._

Sitting in the tub, shaking and trying to collect himself, Herman wondered — was that all he was, a twisted, deformed version of himself, the man he'd once been? It was bleak, and Herman knew it was. But he suspected that it was also true, and that it made him weak, and that scared him.

He stayed there for a while, huddled up at the end of the tub, hand knotted in his hair, until he let go and grasped onto the stump of his right arm. When he opened his eyes again, searching for something to distract himself from his thoughts, they happened to catch the handgun on the chair next to him. His gun, his safety blanket. He stared at it.

_No. Don't even think about it. That's not helpful._

Herman squeezed his eyes shut, and turned his head. This time, when he opened his eyes he caught sight of the little yellow duck.

_Better._

Lost, Herman reached out and grabbed the duck, and clung to it. Those words from around thirty years ago that had been barked at him as he stood shaking, afraid and overwhelmed and staring at the chaos and hell around him, rang in his ears as if they'd only just been spoken moments ago. He clung to them, too, like he clung to the duck in his hands.

_Come on, son! Back to reality!_

_Get out of your head._

_And get your shit together._

**oOo**

Herman stood outside the tavern, and stared up at the sign. It wasn't late in the day, only five in the afternoon, but the dark winter sky made it feel much later.

Any energy he'd managed to replenish earlier in the day had been sapped, making the walk from his place to Moe's feel longer than it should have. Herman wasn't sure exactly how long ago it was since he'd been dragged home by Moe and Lenny from the tavern. It felt like weeks, but it could just as easily have been only days ago. A lack of sleep, he'd noticed, seemed to stretch time out a bit. Alcohol squashed it back together again.

Time was funny like that.

Sleet started coming down, but Herman stood immobile as he stared up at the tavern sign. He'd initially considered driving, but he didn't want to have to deal with getting his car home after drinking and there was no way was he leaving it outside Moe's tavern overnight. Some unscrupulous bastard (probably possessing a similarly opportunistic nature to Herman's own) would surely find a way to steal it. So, walking had seemed the best option.

Tonight, like any other night that he visited Moe's, he hoped the tavern was mostly empty. But tonight he wished it especially more so. The thought that there could be other people in there didn't help Herman's hesitation. Neither did the possibility that there were people in there who were present the last time he visited.

He tried to summon the energy to enter the tavern as he continued to stare up at the sign. Herman knew that getting wasted wouldn't help, but neither would sitting at home, stewing in regrets and memories, throwing things against his walls, and hearing the voices of old brothers in arms.

Herman was running out of viable solutions to what felt like a set of increasingly serious and concerning problems. It wasn't an ideal answer to his problems, but at least Moe's was something he was familiar with. He'd managed to make it all the way there, too — despite the state his mind and body was in. Maybe, he thought, that was a sign that he should go in. Maybe the company would help. Maybe he'd get a break from himself.

Standing outside Moe's getting wet and cold was a far inferior solution to his woes, Herman decided, so he took a deep, grounding breath in, and pushed the door open.

Herman was relieved to note he'd guessed rightly — the bar was mostly empty. A couple of guys sat at the far end of the bar, and Herman nodded to them as they turned to look at him. One waved, the other nodded back in acknowledgment. Herman made a beeline for the bar and, as the only person not sitting or standing near-immobile in the tavern, the eyes of the two regulars followed him.

Behind the bar, Moe turned to look at him, and flung the dish rag over his shoulder with a frown when he saw who his newest customer was.

Herman attempted a grin. "Evenin', Moe."

The bartender set down the mug he was cleaning, and gave Herman a warning look that was normally reserved for rowdy drunks. "Stop makin' that face. Ya lucky I'm not kickin' ya out after last week, Herman. You was an asshole the other night, Lenny was only tryin' ta help."

"Yeah, I know," Herman mumbled, giving up on a smile and replacing it with (what he hoped was) a look of resignation. He sighed. "Well, I figured. Don't remember the whole evening."

Moe made a grunt of displeased understanding. "Guessed as much. Lucky for you, business is slow tonight, so I suppose ya can stay. So, what'll it be?" Moe placed his hands on the bar top, leaning toward Herman. He sniffed, and frowned. "Hold on, have ya been drinkin' already? Ya smell like beer. And," Moe wrinkled his nose, "what's that, chamomile or somethin'?"

"I already had some Duff before I got here," Herman said, not addressing Moe's latter observation. "Only had two cans, Moe. That's hardly anythin', you know that."

It was a small lie, but it was untrue, and judging by the expression on his face it looked like Moe knew it too.

"And ya ran out?" Moe stood back from the bar, and folded his arms, regarding Herman watchfully.

"Funny, huh?" Herman said lightly, attempting another smile as he took a seat at the bar. "Well, maybe I wanted company while I got wasted, too."

Moe held Herman's gaze, and narrowed his eyes. "That's a coincidence, Herman, coz ya said the same thing on Tuesday last week, and ya know what? I don't buy it."

"Why not?"

"Well, for starters I don't buy that a guy who stockpiles Jell-O don't also stockpile beer." Herman's smile was pushed into a scowl, but Moe started grinning. "I'm on the money, ain't I? Duff Dry?"

"Classic," Herman said tersely, unhappy to be caught lying.

"Alright, Classic," Moe repeated. Mug in hand, he turned to the three taps at the bar and started to pour from one of them. Moe had an uncanny ability to be perceptive, and tactful too — on occasion. Herman made a mental note that apparently tonight wasn't one of those occasions.

"You know, I don't like being called a liar, Moe," Herman said in a chilly tone, raising his chin to glare at the side of Moe's face. "I can take my business elsewhere—"

"Hey, I didn't mean ta offend ya or nutin'… I was just thinkin', though," Moe said in an airy tone, shrugging, with his hand on the tap handle as he angled the mug under the faucet, "either ya goin' through a lotta beer at the moment, or ya really did come here for some company, and I don't know ya to be a social guy, Herman." He passed the beer to Herman. "So eitha way, somethin's wrong."

Herman snatched the mug from him, earning a slight look of irritation from Moe, and brought it up to his lips. "You're too canny for your own good—"

"Ya wanna talk about it?"

Instead of taking a sip, Herman set the glass back down and looked at Moe. The bartender's tone had been offhand and casual, and despite the innocent and probing look on Moe's face, Herman knew it concealed some further interest. Moe was a man who was much smarter than he looked, and who normally didn't say anything that he didn't consider with deliberation. Spending large amounts of time around drunk people who could get upset at the slightest provocation probably had something to do with it.

Herman couldn't trust him. Or, anyone.

_Never trust a man more sober than yourself._

Moe put his hands up and continued, an attempt — Herman reckoned — to dis-spell the tension he'd now caused. "Hey, I mean, ya don't have ta tell me. Just… I know what it's like ta be a bit of a loner."

"I don't want to go into it, Moe. I just want you to get me beer when I need it. That's all. I don't need a shrink."

Moe sighed, and shook his head. "Yeah, alright. Well, maybe pace yaself a little better this time. Ya mightn't remember the other night, but we was worried about ya. It ain't like ya to come here after so long and get wasted like that." The bartender retrieved the dish rag from his shoulder and picked up a new mug to clean.

We. That meant he must have spoken to Lenny, at least, about what had happened on Tuesday after Herman had gone back to the store. Maybe it meant that he'd also spoken to the other regulars about it too… Herman looked around, to check whether the other two men at the tavern were watching him and Moe, but they seemed preoccupied with their beer.

Herman shifted in his chair, hand grasping the handle of the mug. He felt uncomfortable about the fact that his drunkenness that night had potentially been discussed with multiple people. On top of that, he also didn't want to think about the fact that apparently people were concerned about him.

"I'm doin' OK," he offered, but not bothering with any levity in his tone or expression. He looked at Moe blankly. "I'm fine. I'm just too sober right now. That's my only problem." Herman traced a finger down the side of the mug in front of him, feeling the wet condensation from the cold beer on his fingertips. At least it wasn't a complete lie. He was definitely too sober right now, but that wasn't his only problem.

Moe moved away. Something about that made Herman uneasy, and he sculled the beer, shoving the empty mug in front of himself.

"Hey Moe," Herman started, continuing after the bartender turned around to look at him, "you… you know if anyone comes in askin' after me—"

"Yeah, yeah, Herman, I know the drill. Ya was never here." Moe rolled his eyes and took the mug from the counter top. "Another one?"

"Thanks."

"Ya know no-one ever comes in here askin' after ya, right?"

"One day someone will." Herman leaned in close to Moe, across the counter, and hissed, "There are people watchin' me, Moe."

Moe's disbelief was clear from his expression.

"Hey, I am _not_ crazy," Herman said, and he looked around and lowered his tone. "They are after me. I know it, I've heard them outside my home. You know, they tap the lines and record—"

"No they don't," Moe interrupted, as if, Herman thought, it were a fact and not an opinion of his. He pushed Herman's refilled mug forward with a look of skepticism.

"Yes, they do! It's why I don't have a telephone anymore."

"I thought that was because no-one called ya."

"Well, no, just… Shut the hell up, Moe." Herman frowned and glared at the mug in front of him. "Well, I don't want to talk to anyone either. Fuck 'em, Moe. Fuck them, and fuck the government. A man can't so much as shit without them knowin' about it." Herman looked up at Moe, who had moved away on a mission to find a new mug to polish. "Say, did ya hear about Nick?"

"Yeah," Moe said, turning around again, with a new mug in hand that seemed to have appeared out of nowhere. He approached the bar, leaning in towards Herman conspiratorially. "Yeah… They say someone grassed on him."

"I was there when boys in blue caught up with 'im." Herman said, and Moe's eyes widened.

"Ya were?" Moe was a sucker for gossip, and Herman almost grinned at how easily he'd reeled him back in.

"Yeah. I bet they tapped his phone lines. Or had a bug in his office or somethin', I mean I didn't find anythin' when I was there, but you know…" Herman lowered his voice even more. "The government has a lot of technology we civvies don't know about. It doesn't surprise me that they nabbed 'im. He was always a shady bastard, and he always played it fast and loose. That's why he got caught."

"Ha, you're one to talk Herman!" Moe set his mug down, leaning on the bar top. "Callin' _him_ shady, that's rich comin' from you." He pointed at Herman with the hand that still held the dishrag.

Herman shot Moe a pointed glare from over the rim of his mug. "Moe, you ain't a saint. I know for a fact that shotgun of yours ain't got a serial number anymore."

"Hmph! At least it's got two full-length barrels."

"Huh." Herman had forgotten about that particular gun of his. "You got me there. Don't ever try to make one of those, Moe. They ain't worth it. That damn thing has too much kickback and too much spray, and it's even louder than it was before. Damn near useless now… I shouldn't have sawed it down so much. I'm not sure what I was thinkin'…" As he had some more beer, a thought occurred to him. "Wait… Moe, how do you know about my sawed-off?"

"Well uh…" The bartender stared down at the counter and shrugged in a nonchalant way, but the way he twisted the dishrag in his hands told Herman that Moe felt anything but comfortable. "I hear things around town. And I mean, I don't believe 'em, _necessarily_…"

Judging by the expression on his face and how reluctant Moe seemed to be about discussing exactly what he'd heard, Herman knew exactly what he was talking about. It didn't take a stretch of the imagination for Herman to take a guess at what Moe had been told. He sighed, and rubbed his brow. "Look… I don't wanna go into it Moe, but it… really wasn't like what everyone says it was, and—"

"Hey, ya don't need to defend yaself to me. Innocent until proven guilty, right? We all done stuff of a dubious nature." Moe replied, refilling the mug. It was a kind sentiment, but Herman detected a note of uneasiness in his voice. Herman got the distinct impression that not only did Moe not believe what he was saying, but that he also didn't really believe that he was like Herman at all.

"Just… don't believe everything you hear about that, alright Moe? Half that shit ain't true, you know how people in this place like to talk." Herman scratched at the bar top, noting the grime that came off it and the much brighter wood that lay underneath.

"Hey, quit messin' with my bar counter."

"I ain't messin' with it Moe, I'm cleanin' it. It's filthy."

"Eh, just like you then, huh?"

"Shut up." Herman had some more of his beer, and paused in thought. "Why do none of the peanuts in this bowl look like normal peanuts?"

"What?"

"Like this one." Herman held it up. "It ain't formed properly. I mean, normally you get a few like this when you get a bag of peanuts," Herman grabbed a handful of them, and let them cascade from his hand back into the bowl, "but all of 'em are like it."

"Eh, I get the cheap grades no-one wants except the good people who make peanut butter. It ain't like drunk people's the most perceptive." Moe shrugged. "You're a weird guy, Herman, I ain't had no-one comment on 'em in the five years I been servin' 'em."

"Huh." Herman set the peanut on the bar top and smashed it with the heel of his hand. "They're hard to open. Well, make sure you ain't gettin' ripped off, Moe." He picked up the nut from among the scraps of the husk. "These pods only got one peanut in 'em."

"So?"

"So, make sure you ain't payin' more than you should." Herman threw the peanut into his mouth and chewed it. "If they're chargin' you the same and you get half the amount, that's a rip off. Also, these taste like crap."

"You told me that last time. And, I ain't sure it works like that," Moe said, frowning.

"Yes it does," Herman said, having some more of his beer and eying up the rest of the peanuts. "Big Business always wants to screw you out of your money and have them thank you after they fuck you."

"You mean, Big Peanut?" Moe gave Herman an exasperated look. "Gee Herman, I had no idea we was fightin' against such a powerful force of evil."

"Come on Moe, I'm being serious. I thought you were smarter than that… Hey, did you know peanuts are supposed to—"

Moe abruptly picked up the bowl of nuts and, glaring at Herman, sent it away down the other end of the bar. The other patrons caught it and grinned, digging their hands into the bowl.

"Why the hell'd you do that?" Herman pouted. "I was gonna eat some of those."

"Yeah, well…" Moe trailed off. "Now ya ain't." He started mumbling something about peanuts and Herman and how he wasn't an idiot.

"No need to pitch a hissy fit." Herman shifted his weight onto his elbow. He watched Moe move away from him, snapping the dishrag in his hand, and continuing to mumble to himself as he returned the glass to the shelf and grabbed the next one in line.

Herman imagined Moe was very right when he'd said that he knew what it was like to be a loner. Moe's tavern reeked of sweaty drunks, hops, and loneliness. Herman tried to imagine what it would be like to work in that environment, day in and day out, with no light, no sun, no fresh air, and shuddered. No wonder Moe was so gloomy. The only people he regularly interacted with were either drunk or wishing that they were.

Sometimes Herman noticed something behind Moe's eyes, something small and sad that surfaced occasionally, that was usually replaced immediately afterward by self-pity. Whenever Herman saw it he usually just got up and left.

Herman couldn't stand self-pity.

"Quit starin' at me and not sayin' anythin', Herman," Moe snapped. "Ya makin' me nervous."

"You have regrets, Moe?"

Moe turned, and gave him an irritated look. "What, like them peanuts?"

Herman snorted. "No, not like the peanuts." He pulled a smoke out of his pocket, and stuck it in his mouth. "Bigger than peanuts—"

"Hey! Don't even think about lightin' that up in here!" Moe pointed an accusatory finger at him.

"Come on Moe, just let me have one. The weather's crap outside. And quit pokin' your finger at me. I don't like it."

"Ain't my problem," Moe said, not only continuing to point at Herman but also jabbing his finger at him. "I ain't gettin' another fine. Put it away."

"Lousy non-smokin'…" Herman grumbled and removed the smoke from between his lips, putting it back in his breast pocket.

"That's better."

"It really ain't," Herman said, and had some more of his beer as a replacement for his smoke. Orally fixated, that's what the last shrink he'd seen had said to him decades ago. The term had somehow stuck with Herman through the years, and he wondered if there was some merit in it, despite not really knowing exactly what the condition entailed. He'd always thought it had something to do with sex — after all, in the world of psychotherapy didn't nearly everything have something to do with sex, somehow? — and if that was the case (Herman smirked), well then a little bit of _oral fixation_ didn't seem so bad.

There were a few other things that shrink had written on his discharge form too, but Herman preferred not to think about those.

He sighed, and it turned into a yawn. "So… Do you?"

"Do I what, Herman?"

"Have regrets. And I ain't talkin' about those blasted peanuts, Moe."

"Regrets?" The shadow of something passed across Moe's face, and he stood up a little straighter. Herman narrowed his eyes, tensed up. "Yeah, well, maybe s'a few things here and there… Why's that?"

Herman took a deep breath in. "Would you do any of it differently? The shit you regret?"

"Yeah well, some of it, maybe. But… It's been done an' livin' in the past ain't gonna help nobody."

Herman finished his beer, and pushed the empty mug forward. "What about the times you knew you were doing somethin' wrong, and hell, maybe you enjoyed it, and you look back on those times now and think, shit. That was good. That was… _Something_." Herman looked up at Moe. "Do you ever regret that stuff, Moe?"

Before Moe could answer, Herman continued his train of thought.

"Do you ever feel guilty when you don't regret that shit? The stuff everyone thinks — that _you_ really think — you should?" Herman stared at the beer, but it might as well have been that rubber duck from earlier, as he resumed. "You know, I came back from Vietnam… I _came back from Vietnam_, which is more than I can say for a lot of other guys that got sent there. Or who volunteered."

Moe was still silent, watching Herman carefully, but — fueled by alcohol — Herman was speaking again before he even realized he was. "Did you know that there was no flag-wavin', no parade for us when we returned? We weren't heroes, not like the guys in World War Two, now those, _those_ were fuckin' soldiers! No, no-one back home wanted to hear about the men who died in 'Nam though, and hardly anyone I knew who went there and came back ever talked about it. And we were thrown back into society, no help, no safety net, nothin', completely alone — they expected us to float when so many men were obviously sinkin', and slinkin' around still thinkin' we were gonna get shot at in mall car parks and general stores… Like I said. Fuck the government, Moe. Fuck it!"

Herman slammed his fist onto the counter, the sensation coming back to him delayed by the alcohol he'd consumed. Moe jumped a little, watching him warily.

"Fuck the government!" Herman repeated, banging his fist on the counter again, which also drew the attention of the two men at the end of the bar. The anger and frustration from earlier came back. "They stole my youth…. They fuckin' sent me away to die in some fuckin' backwoods backward-ass bullshit war that could have been fixed in months, not years… And they fuckin' drove the only woman I loved out of Springfield!"

"Woah, calm down—"

"I don't want to calm down! God damn it, the two things that give my life meaning are the fact that I was a part of the fucking army, and the two-and-a-half months I got to spend with Mona. And that was thirty years ago! And she wasn't even my woman!" Herman clenched his fist, stared at it. "I don't regret either even though I'm worse off for both of 'em, and that's the saddest fuckin' thing of all!"

The bar was very quiet. The two men at the other end of the bar had stopped talking, and were both looking over at him. In the silence, Herman felt self conscious and exposed, as if they could see how hollow he really felt.

"Who the hell is Mona?" Moe asked with an expression of confusion.

_That's not why they're staring at you._

He'd made an awful mistake.

"No-one." Herman pushed his glass forward again. "More beer please, Moe."

"Nah, I think ya had enough" Moe shook his head and took the mug away. "Go home, Herman."


End file.
